Morning run in the neighborhood/suburban.

Plants for the front yard

Ok, That is a lot of plants. Maybe I got carried away a little, but I have to follow the HOA's guideline for how many plants I need in my front yard. 

This is going to be interesting. How to get the tree into the hole. The best way to get the tree in the hole is to cut of the bottom of the plastic pot and open up one side of the pot. Then roll/lift it into the hole and after that you just pull of the plastic pot.                                                                                       I have learned since I bought this tree that you should not dig a round hole because then the rots keeps follow the hard soil around and not expend out while if you dig a hole with angles it keeps going due to that it can't do a 90 degree turn.  

It is important to dig a big hole so the rots have a easy job growing in the beginning. You can put the same old dirt back, but there is different kind of soil and nutrients you can mix into the old soil to help the tree get started. The most important part is that the soil around the tree now is soft. 

Front yard, watering system

The first step when you are landscaping is figuring out the watering system. I am going to need a drip system in both the front yard and the back yard for my plants. 

Time to plan the drip system. 

Where does the water come from and where will the valves and the control box be. Are they on the same side of the house? Of cause not, that would have made it too easy. 

To be able to get the water from one side to the other side of my front yard, the water has to go under the driveway. The builder put a thick pipe going under the driveway so now I only have to find where it is. They said about 2 feet. From the bottom or the top? After some digging it is found. 

Next I have to plan where I want my plants so the pipes will cover that area and I also need a pipe going to the back of my house. I am not going to worry about the back of my house right now but I need to prepare for it.                                                                              It is pretty hard to dig in a straight line so I put up a string to follow.

Time to decide where the valve box is going to go. More digging. 

The watering system is going to have one valve for the front yard and two for the back. One will be for the trees and one for the bushes so I can regulate the amount of water they get after their needs. 

To get to the back yard I had to dig under the gate. There was a block of concrete I had to dig under. 

Cotton balls

Picked up some cotton balls that were left behind after the harvest. They are so beautiful. 

New Back Yard covered in weed.

HI

It has been a while since my last post. I have moved to a new house with a new backyard to fix. From just having dirt in my backyard I got this lovely green backyard when the rain and warm weather hit Arizona. So should I let it die in the heat or some how get ride of it?

How to built a pool - Shotcrete

They start with putting up shields around the pool because the concrete is actually shot on the walls and it splashes a lot. I asked if they should do a thicker shell because of the expanding soil here and they thought that was a good idea. Especially since this area has been farmland before.

The steel bar are a little more than 3 inch up so we decide to just add that extra inch. So the bottom will be around 7 inch instead of 6. They start with the steps so they can dry a little till they need to walk on them. Then they take the benches and the walls. The last thing they do is the bottom of the pool.

3, 5 hour after they arrived they are done and now it is only cleaning up to do.

When the shotcrete dries it cracks. There will always be surface cracks but you have to look out for bigger cracks. If you can fit a quarter in the crack it is too big.

You can test if it is a surface crack or a deeper crack. Pour some water in the crack and if no water is coming out from the crack even if you add more, it is probably not a surface crack. Call your subcontractor and they send someone out to check it up for you.

The shotcrete company will give you some instructions how to keep your pool from drying too fast, follow the instructions. Keep watering the pool for at least 5 days. 

My steps. I'm satisfied with the shape of the stair but the first step is very small and the second step should probably been a little bigger. One more thing with the steps is that the shape is making a corner, and that's never good in a pool. If there is a corner then there is a place for sand to get stuck.

The pool has finally got a shape and with all the four steps. Now I can go down in it and feel how deep it is.

Jasmine

Jasmine is a lovely plant. It has a fantastic fragrance that is especially strong in the evening. I have two different jasmines. They are both vines but you can find jasmine in bush form too. In the beginning I was just winding the branches back into the plant but like most plants it gets bushier if you cut it. The gardener takes the bush saw and just sweeps it over the bush and since the plant is a complete mess with vines going in and out it gives probably not the best result but in a couple of weeks the plant has regrown and it looks great.

My yellow Jasmine blooms first and when it is all over it is time for the white one to bloom. The yellow jasmine is also called Carolina jessamine because it is South Carolina’s state flower.

My jasmine is easy to care for and they can take both heat and cold good. I have mine in full sun and they have never burned. They have never been covered and they haven’t taken any damage so far from those few cold nights we get here in Gilbert, AZ.

Read more about jasmine:

How to Care for a Jasmine Bush Plant

Outdoor Jasmine Plant Guide

The Fragrant Jasmine

How to built a pool - Inspection

You can schedule an inspection by telephone or online in Gilbert. Use your Permit ID NO. when scheduling inspections. Call: 480-503-6700 or go online

How fast you can get your inspection depends on their workload. I built my pool off season so I got the inspection next day. The inspection took only about 10 minutes. He checked: how deep the gas pipes was buried, the pressure on the gas pipe,  pressure on the water pipes, that a wire was place by the gas pipe and the water pipes, so the pipes is easy to find after they been covered since they are made of plastic.

Now maybe the ground finally can be leveled out. So it doesn't have to look like Moon Base Alpha in the backyard. I'm so scared someone is going to trip on all this holes.

Regrowing Salad

I am done with this salad, only the bottom is left, but instead of throwing it away I put it in a glass of water and it is regrowing. It is going to be interesting to see how big it can grow on only water. Maybe I should put it in some soil. 

How to built a pool - Gas Heater

If you are going to have a gas heater to your pool or spa you need to include special information for the permit and you also need a special inspection.

I wasn't home when they dug the hole, I wonder how the machine looked like that made that kind of hole. The gas line have to be buried deeper than the electric lines and the plumbing. Make sure before you get your permit where you going to have the heater and where the gas lines is going to be. If you like to change some gas lines it counts as a change of plan and you have to fill in more papers, get an additional permit and it will cost you some extra dollars.

Avocado

The avocado plant is growing big it is time to cut it off. Sad but if I don't cut it off the plant will continue to grow only in one direction, up. After cutting off the top the plant should grow in two direction. We'll see.

I put the cut off top in a glass of water. If the top gets roots I have two plants.

How to built a pool - Electric

With electric I would say the most important is the equipment. We were told to take two, 2 hp pumps but we bought one pump with 4 different power levels instead. It was a lot more expensive but we saved some money on the installation fee and there is a lot of money to save when we use the pump.

Since the pump has 4 different speeds we don't have to run the pump on maximum all day and night, we can decide on how much power the pump should run on.

We run the pump on a low speed for a couple of hours during the day for the circulation and during the night when the electricity is cheaper we run the cleaning on a higher speed. When the pump is running on a low speed it is very quiet, the higher speed makes a lot more noise but that we don’t have to worry about because we are asleep at that time.

Here is one of the lights installed. The wires are grounded in the house. Everything is grounded even the sleeve for the basketball hoop is grounded.

The wires that goes to the pool is not in copper but the one around the pool are, and it is expensive. To save some dollars try to make the distance between the control panel and the lights short.

Agave-marginata

Agave

I have an agave plant that I don't know what kind it is, I think it is an Agave Marginata. The gardeners keep cutting it so it looks more like a small palm tree now. They dig up all suckers so I can't get more plants but one day I succeeded do save one small plant before they arrived. I put it in a glass of water and waited for roots to grow. 










It is time to plant it outside in the soil. Good luck little plant.

How to built a pool - Steel

Steel

The guys arrived early and worked quickly. Here you can see how they just lay the steel bars on the ground after they cut them to the right length and then they wind them together with some kind of steel thread.








The stairs is still only 2,5 step.

They put blocks under the steel bars, so they stay about 3 inch above ground. It is important that the steel will be in the middle of the shotcrete. This is probably the most important part. Since if the steel is too high off the ground you will end up paying for more shortcrete but if it is too close to the ground the shell will be too thin. If you live in an area with expending soil you maybe should talk to the shotcrete company about how thick your pool shell should be.

Grapes

Spring time. The winter was so mild this year, so the leaves on the grape vines are early. I am a little bit worried every year if I cut too much or too little. As I said before I don't like cutting down my grape but if I want some grapes I have to. The question is; did I cut the right vines? 

WOW. During the winter it looks like it is all dead but now it is growing so fast I have to tie up new outgrowths every week. Maybe I didn't cut down enough.

The grape is soon going to bloom and it looks like a lot this year too. Yeah.

How to built a pool - Plumbing

Plumbing

They company had calculated how many pop up heads we needed and where to put them. But when they saw the pool they got a little frustrated. It didn't look exactly as my drawing. One of the benches where too long, it didn't match with their plan for the heads. To make the water and the dirt in the water move toward the drain the pop up heads need to be in the exact right place.

The steps and benches did not have the exact shapes as on the drawing that they got from me. When you fax a paper some of the measurement changes and if you hand draw it even makes it worse. (That's a good reason for using some computer program to draw the pool.) Then comes the layout guy and he makes the benches and steps on freehand and when the excavation guys digs the hole the benches and steps gets a little different shape again.

Here they are marking out where the heads are going to be and how the pipes are going. Then it is time to start digging. Again. You can tell that digging in Arizona soil is nothing you do easily.

Now all the plumbing is done. The pop up heads are sticking up right now but will be cut off later. There are pop up heads on each step and on all benches. And since we didn't have a step for our feet on the drawing they had to add another head. Now there is a lot of soil everywhere but they leaving the ground open for the electrician and also for the inspection later on.

 It is a lot of pipes. In the far left corner is the pump and the heater. The tall pipes on the left is the pipe for the water to the slide. You can see the two skimmers and  a lot of pop up heads actually 25 of them. There are also looped returns. You can see one on each side of the deep side of the pool.

Dwarf bottlebrush

Dwarf bottlebrush, or Little John bottlebrush

This plant has such funny flowers. We bought them because the hummingbirds like to eat nectar from them. This how it looks right now. 

It doesn't need a lot of water and can handle the sun pretty good. Since we only had them for a couple of month and "the winter" was very mild this year I don't have so much experience with them, I will come back later if I find out something interesting.

More about Dwarf Bottlebrush;

Velvety Dwarf Bottlebrush Beckons a Touch

Dwarf Bottlebrush

How to built a pool - Excavation

Excavation

The first thing they asked was if the line was the excavation line or the waterline. Since many home owner that layout their pools themselves don't add the 6 extra inches, that the pool itself is going to take up, even if it is only 6 inch it is going to make the pool, 1 feet shorter and 1 feet narrow so that is not something the excavation company want to be accused of.


This is the deepest end, 6 feet, and it is the small circle, 14 feet diameter. You can see that they already dug out for the skimmer and one of the lights.

The guy who dug the pool wanted to be nice and added a shelf to have the feet on. The problem was he made it way too big. It was about two and a half feet so it would probably stick out under the cliff that the kids were going to jump from so I asked him to make it smaller. 1,5 feet, it still looked big. We decided to make it only 1 foot and if it was to small the rock guys could make it bigger.  

You can now see where the grotto is going to be and the bench beside the grotto.

The crew is almost done digging. But it is still a lot of dirt left. For a while I was little worried that the trampoline was going to be buried. If you want to save some dirt for later just tell them and they leave you some. Just remember there are going to be more digging. The plumber, the electrician and the gas company are going to leave you dirt after they been digging and if you are going to plant some plants there are a lot of dirt that you need to get ride of later on.

Today they just have to finish up the big circle ,18 feet diameter, 4 feet deep with the four steps. When I went outside to look at the work there were only two steps. The first two one. They told me that the other two will the steel guy built. I called my pool supervisor, yes, it was correct.

The pool looks so big and so deep, and it is. Right now it is 6 feet and 9 inch at the deepest. The 9 inch is for the pipes, steel, shotcrete and the interior.

The tile is going to be where the board are. The plank is to check that the elevation is correct. You can see the two steps to the right and the other hole of the light, also to the right. And in the far right corner you can see the other bench.

My pool supervisor came and checked the depth on the pool, made sure the hole for the skimmer and lights was big enough. He also checked the elevation. The elevation of the pool is important because since you want the water to drain away from the pool down in the deck drain. The elevation is the height of the bond beam minus 2 but in our case we had put pavers on the patio so the decking are going to be a little bit higher so our elevation was - 2,5 inch. If you are going to do a thicker decking you have to take that in the calculations too. The deck is usually 4 inch thick but if you have expending soil in your area you can put an extra inch on the decking to prevent cracking.

I think this "elevation-stuff" is hard so I asked the guy that did the pool layout to spray the elevation on the ground. So the excavation company didn't have to ask me about it.

Prickly Pear

Prickly Peat is a fascinating cactus. It looks intriguing, need very little water, you can plant it around your yard like a living barbwire and you can even eat it. 

Like all plants they are small in the beginning but it will after a couple of years spread all over. It grows fast for a cactus. When we planted our prickly pear we planted it next to one of the dripping system controller head. That was not so wisely done. 

The prickly pear has two different kind of thorns. Big thick white ones and thin almost-impossible-to-see once. The big thorns are soft on the new outgrowth but not the thin once.

I try to keep the plant small by taking off some of its new outgrowth every year. I don't use a thong or saw. I just wear heavy work gloves. These gloves can only be used to this because they will be filled with thorns. Using a folded newspaper in between the glove and the cactus is something I am going to try next time to save the gloves and my fingers.

The thorns has small hooks that makes it hard to pull them out when they get stuck in your skin.

I have heard that you can cut off a pad, let it dry for a week and then plant it in a shallow depression cut side down to get a new plant. Water every 2 weeks to get the roots started. Have to try that one. My neighbor have a prickly pear without thorns, I would like that one. 

Read more about prickly pears;

Eat Prickly Pear 

Prickly Pear Cactus

How to built a pool - Utility marking

Utility marking

Before they start to dig you have to call all utilities/facility in your area to make sure that you don't have any lines or pipes in your backyard. Utility companies have two working days to respond. They must dig by hand if you need to dig within 2 feet either side of a marked line.

Instead of you trying to guess which company you need to call, call Arizona Blue Stake. Arizona Blue Stake was established as a one-call notification system by underground facility owners to assist excavators. This damage prevention service is provided free of charge to any individual or company planning to excavate.

Markings are valid for only 15 working days. Call Arizona Blue Stake two full working days before expiration date if you need to continue to dig or if the markings are not visible anymore, during the digging.

When you call the  Arizona Blue Stakes they are going to ask for the name and telephone number on the company that are going to do the excavation.

What the color means:

Purple    Reclaimed Water

Red	Electric Power
Yellow	Gas and Oil Product
Orange	Telephone, Cable Television, Fiber Optics
Blue	Water System
Green	Sanitary Sewer System