Weed free garden paths and moving a water faucet.

 I didn’t install this lovely vegetable garden, but Nancy asked us to do a little tweaking. I think the main problem was weeds in the pathway, but there was more to be done. The raised beds had settled and were covered with weeds, so we spent quite a bit of time pulling the weeds and then adding several inches of compost to raise the height of the growing medium. Here’s the overview:

On what I think is an amusing note, I forgot the camera on the first day and with my type of step by step description, there’s no going back. Added to that, Dekie had changed the camera settings to black and white for some of her art work—and I didn’t notice. It should be interesting. We decided to put landscape fabric in the pathways to help control the weeds. Notice the corner fastened by staples furnished with the fabric. When we ran out of staples, we used large nails to hold the fabric down.

It took a lot of cutting and fitting to get it just right, but when finished, the fabric job looked like this:

The person who did the initial installation had put a faucet down in the ground inside the center bed. This was hard to get to, plants grew over it and hid it in the growing season, and the location was just totally unsatisfactory. We decided to move it to a better location.

I decided that we would leave the faucet in the ground to be used as a shut off valve in the winter. This seemed to be the easiest and most effective manner for the hookup. We dug out around the faucet

I bought an adaptor to change the hose thread on the faucet to standard pipe threads. FHT=Female hose threads, FIP=female pipe threads.

I needed to change the direction of the pipe, so I used a ¾ street ell. Notice that the threads are wrapped with Teflon tape to keep the joint from leaking.

The street ell installed

I added a 90 degree elbow and turned it toward the direction the pipe would run.

Here’s the pipe in the ground running to the fence.

The faucet is installed (using Teflon tape) and the pipe is fastened to the fence post with zip ties.

Here’s a picture of the fabric and plumbing installed:

We talked about all sorts of coverings for the pathways and decided on cypress wood chips. We spread the chips and were very happy with the results. It took 50-2 cubic foot bags of cypress chips

Now, all Nancy has to do is add plants and water. Yay. (I’ll check the color settings before writing another post)

Click here to find more tips on working with pvc pipe

I hope you enjoyed the article. I’ll bet you will also enjoy my novel

As usual, I would just love for you click here to go to Amazon and purchase the ebook edition of my wonderful book, Requiem for a Redneck to go on your Kindle. I have also noticed that Amazon now has a free Kindle app for iphones and tablets. Is that cool or what?