More Thoughts on Life in Paradise #3

Ever had a sprinkler system? I hadn't until moving here. You'd think it would be a simple and trouble free way to keep your lawn and landscaping watered, but no. Yesterday was the third time we've been out there for over an hour trying to adjust things. First off, there's an control box in the garage. You set the days of the week, times of day, length of time, and percentage of water spraying out for each of the "stations." One station isn't one sprayer, it's a group of them.

When we bought the house, no instructions came with it, and no map of where the various sprinkler stations were. I figured out how to set the controls, but as a complete amateur, I had no idea (and still don't) how long to have the water on. This is a critical point since some of the landscape plants apparently don't like too much or too little water.

Another issue is where are the sprinklers? Unless you clear the wells out about once a month, some of the pop-up sprinklers disappear under a load of sand, leaves and grass, which washes in during the rains and grass grows over them. Apparently, the former owners hadn't been concerned about this -- or watering at all -- since when we bought the house, the yard was practically a beach without water (no real soil here, just dirty sand) and many of the sprinkler heads were buried. My husband and son went around the yard stabbing through the sand with a sword (no kidding) to try to find them. The located some, bu not all of them.

Normally, because of watering restrictions in Florida, we have to water before sunrise or after sunset, and only on a designated day of the week, so it's not possible to actually see what they are doing. However, we kept hearing that one near our bedroom window was spraying on the house. Not good. Then we found water on the garage floor. It wasn't coming from the roof (thank goodness), and there is no source of water in the garage, so the only possibility was water coming from outside -- through the wall, apparently.

So, we went out with a diagram of the house perimeter and yard I made to try to actually find all of the stations and mark them on the diagram, note which station turned them on, and where the spray went. I discovered that not only was that one spraying on the house, it was broken. So were a couple of othe ones flooding the ground, including one by the garage wall. Some didn't pop up. So, we fixed what we could.

Since then, we've been out there a couple more times. You have to be prepared to get soaked doing this, which would probably feel good during a 90-something summer day, but was quite cool yesterday in the 60s with a breeze. We found several more of them spraying the walls of the house and flooding at the base. Looks like we have more work ahead. I think we got them mostly pointed away from the house, at least.

Now, to figure out how long to have them run . . . and next, how take care of some of these plants I know nothing about.