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Vigoro 3015V Sprinkler Timer Internals and Valve Design

JonC — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:50:09 +0000

I noticed a lot of interest in my sprinkler timer review post and I wanted to expand on that a bit. In this post I’ll tear apart the Vigoro 3015V Sprinkler Timer and see what inside of it and makes it work. This timer has worked reliably for me, but I switched to the Orbit multi-zone sprinkler timer system so this unit was spare. I can’t resist opening up stuff and checking it out. Please read through the post and post a comment if you like.

The Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer is a single-zone outdoor unit which connects directly to your outdoor hose lines and has an option for a remote water sensor unit which is attached to a receiver. The case is glued, or more likely ultrasonically welded closed around the internal components.

If you want to see large versions of these images just click on the image in the page you can use the << and >> button at the bottom of the image viewer to move between photos.

The first step in opening the case is to pull out my trusty craftsman moto-tool and cut carefully through the seam of the box. I wore safety glasses for this as hot plastic gets thrown all over the place.

I didn’t want to cut through the valves or through the plug for the water sensor receiver antenna, so I used a screwdriver just to pop the remaining edges of the seams. It came apart pretty easily.

With that done we can now see the internals of the Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer and get an idea for how they do things. I’ve labeled the different components inside of the housing. You can see the battery terminals, Rain Sensor Antenna connector (mislabeled as ‘temp sensor’, the water valve and in the bottom of the shell you can see the ‘potted’ electronics section with the battery terminals going into it. The potting materials are usually an epoxy type material which is designed to completely seal the electronics and protect them from any moisture damage.

I disconnected the valve assembly for a closer look as seen in this next picture on the right hand side. The valve has a long barrel section which looks something like a rifle scope, and attached to the left hand side with the red and black wires is the drive motor and gearing.

Here’s a side view of the valve. You can see the drive motor a bit more clearly as well as the one of the gears that it moves. The gearing moves a pin in and out of the valve housing to start and stop the flow of water.

This picture below is the top view of the valve labeled and colored to show the high and low pressure side. The high pressure side from the water inlet comes in from the right and co-axially surrounds the low pressure section which goes to the outlet.

I removed the motor from the valve and you can see a bunch more labels. Of note you can see the high and low pressure taps, and the return spring in the middle. When the pin slides out it connects the high pressure from the high pressure tap to the low pressure tap, causing the main high pressure to compress the spring and open the valve. A more detailed pictorial sequence is further down in this post.

This is the main valve drive motor for the Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer. It consists of a small DC motor and a gear drive with a cam on it. as the motor rotates (rather quickly) it presses the pin in, or pulls the pin out. When the pin is extended the pressure behind the valve diaphragm equalizes and the spring forces the diaphragm closed. When the pin slides out, the opposite happens.

Below is the valve body with the diaphragm removed. If you look at a large version of the photo you can see how there is an outer cavity where the high pressure water comes in from your home and then an inner cavity which is the low pressure/outlet side of the valve.

In the next 3 images you can see a diagram I drew of the valve in the Vigoro 3015V. This is the sequence of the valve opening. Closing the valve works in reverse.

I hope this helps anyone who was curious about how these valves work. There is a gate, but it’s very small and basically acts as a hydraulic switch to operate a larger hydraulically operated valve. It’s kind of neat for me as I’ve always wondered how these things work, and it took me a little bit to figure out how the thing worked. I was expecting to see a large gate with a motor that open and closed it. I think the Orbit valves may work like this, and I am going to be dis-assembling one of my spare valves from my Orbit Sprinkler Timer at some point this week.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments or corrections by filling in the comment form at the bottom of the page.

Weather Slowing Down New Front Sidewalk

JonC — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:15:57 +0000

Well it looks like Summer has -finally- arrive, we’ve had a few 90 degree days this week. Not nearly as bad as they got out west, but I don’t do well in 90 deg days and 80+ % humidity. I was planning to start digging out for the front sidewalk this weekend, but put it off this morning and went out to the R/C flying field I joined last week to hang out with some friends I have there instead, and of course in the afternoon it was too hot to start digging holes in dirt so I sat in the air conditioned room a lot of the afternoon. The one advantage though is that the area we’ll be digging is nicely shaded by the trees in the morning, so this project will probably get some work done on it tomorrow morning.

The plan is to lay out the general design of the sidewalk with string or spray paint, remove the existing blue stone that is there and start digging with the shovel and pick axe. It’s going to be a lot of work because the ground as usual is pretty rocky. As an added bonus the driveway used to go in front of the house. When they decided to cover it up they didn’t remove the existing gravel, they just put a thin coat of topsoil on top of it. this is why there is a driveway sized area across the front of the house and lawn where the grass barely grows at all and there are mostly broad leaf weeds, even after trying to kill them in the spring and planting new seed. It looks terrible and will be partially resolved in September once the weather cools back down and I can plant more grass seed.

I’ll post some progress pictures of the work tomorrow afternoon, hopefully there will be some progress. I want to have a concrete sidewalk in soon, particularly while it’s still good concrete weather. It’s impossible to run the snow-blower over the blue stone pieces that are/were there without shreading the lawn. Someone came and picked up some of the blue stone already and I guess the rest will just go into the pile in the back.

Another Scott’s PatchMaster Performance Update

JonC — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:13:35 +0000

The Scott’s PatchMaster I put down a while back has been doing well so far. It grew in pretty fast and has just been thickening up. It has now been mowed quite a few times. We started mowing when it ‘looked decent’ and have just kept mowing it as part of the normal yard. It’s not super-scientific (though I suppose it could be) but the right time to mow Scott’s PatchMaster is whenever the heck it looks like it needs to be mowed.

Turn the PatchMaster into part of your lawn as soon as possible because the chances are the rest of your lawn may look terrible compared to the patch. Have no fear, over time it will blend in. Before you know it you will want to patch your whole lawn so it looks as good as the patched spot but this would a bad idea, and very expensive. I know this sounds like an ad placement or promotion, but I’m not paid by nor endorsed by Scott’s to promote their lawn care products (aside from occasional advertising through an ad network). My true feelings is that a) the mulch material (paper) could be better filtered for plastics and other things b) if it’s watered it really does grow up quickly c) it usually looks better than the rest of your lawn and c) money well spent, so far!

YOU HAVE TO KEEP IT WET! This is critical or your PatchMaster will fail and your lawn will end up on FailBlog. Additionally, you need to have good loose soil for the roots to grow into. Heavy clay soil, or heavy rock soil may pose a problem to you. If you have either of those I recommend getting a pick axe and shovel and breaking up your soil (watch for water/sewer lines, check your basement for where they exit and use COMMON SENSE). Remove rocky/nasty soil or screen it to get rid of the rocks and debris and add sand/composted manure/topsoil if needed to turn it into decent soil. There are numerous sites dedicated to improving the condition of your soil, I have not written about that as of yet.

In the area in the photos below I added new topsoil to fill in a hole in the lawn. The soil is untreated with chemicals and all natural. It worked out great and I’m sure you can find similar materials local to you or make them from stuff from the local garden shop, Lowe’s, or Home Depot.

Anyway, enough from me, here are the photos of Scott’s PatchMaster at 63 days, slighty over 2 months.

There are Mushrooms Everywhere in the New Lawn

JonC — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:44:15 +0000

Well I woke to quite a surprise this morning! Mushrooms everywhere in the new lawn. Bryn had mentioned he mowed a bunch down when he mowed on Saturday but I didn’t think a lot about it. He didn’t mention that it was like this. Wow! I guess some things get lost in the verbiage

I like to imagine little people moved into my lawn overnight and made little mushroom homes, you can see some of them are clustered like little mushroom palaces, and then just some stand alone mushroom homes here and there. I hope they watch out for the giant man eating spiders which infest the woods nearby and don’t get flooded out when it rains! Perhaps I need to find more exciting hobbies…

I thought this was pretty bizarre that the mushrooms had only grown where we put down the new topsoil to fill in some low spots before we re-seeded the area. I called the topsoil company and the guy there said that it was pretty common with their soil since they don’t treat the soil with any chemicals. He said it’s due mostly to all of the moisture and rain we’ve been having lately and once we got a few hot days they’d pop off and die. He said you can mow the mushrooms down and the next day they’ll grow right back.

After doing some reading it seems like there are a few other ways to get rid of mushrooms. Some favorites are golf clubs, like a pitching wedge. Go out and get some golfing practice in! Alternately you can put lime in your soil, adjusting the PH to the proper levels or use chemicals. Personally they don’t bug me, and are a sign of nutritious soil for plants and lawns and little mushroom people to grow crops in. It’s only when they start to grow in a ring pattern that you may have a problem. This is called a Fairy Ring. Apparently the mushrooms grow on the outer edges of the Fairy Ring, so the circle gets larger and larger. When the fungus in the ground is this large it can start to steal nutrients from your lawn, instead of help it. No Fairy Ring in my lawn, so I’m doubly okay with it.

When I checked later this afternoon they had all been fried by the sun and not a thing was left standing!

I’m suspecting that these mushrooms will come back overnight again since the humidity is pretty high. It’s actually pretty cool that they can grow back so quickly! I’m going to try and get some photos tomorrow morning as well if they’ve come back. The mushrooms are a neat surprise I never expected, I tend to be finding that out a lot with my first experience in home ownership. Some of the home ownership surprises aren’t really that neat, like the ants, or the giant man eating spiders, and I’m sure other things I’ve yet to find. But yes, it’s a mix of good and bad. May life bring you all more mushrooms and less ants or spiders!

UPDATE: It’s been a couple of weeks and the weather has turned hotter, though we stil have thundestroms in the evening. The shrooms have mostly gone to the great mushroom heaven in the sky and we don’t see much of them. Give nature a chance, folks. Enjoy the mushrooms while they last, cause next week it’ll be a giant man eating spider…

Another Day, Another Thunder Storm

JonC — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:35:28 +0000

After weeks of nightly, hours long, rainy downpours they have subsided a bit, but now we’re getting these daily thunderstorms ripping across the Catskills and through town. I posted a video of one the other day which was pretty fantastic and very active for our area. The thunderstorm video below is in the daytime and mostly shows the quantity of rain that comes with these storms. You can see the Scott’s PatchMaster patch in there also after about 5 or 6 weeks of growth. It’s doing well, but of course it looks better than the rest of the lawn.

We will be over-seeding the lawn in September sometime, or possibly just ripping it out and seeding from scratch. I still haven’t decided which is a better way to go. Ripping out the old lawn and laying new seed would definitely be in order since this old lawn has been here for years upon years, and I don’t think there’s much that could make it look good or feel young again. It is certainly a lot more work though, and I would need to bring in more topsoil for some more spots where it’s thin over the rock base.

The gutters on the house are in terrible shape. The one you’ll see in the video is a newer one, but it was not put in properly. There should be a drop in height of the gutter from the non-downspout side to the downspout side, I think whoever did this one just put it in along the edge and went ‘good!’.

You can see the gallons of water pouring out over the edge of the gutters and even at the downspout end of the gutter, although some of the plants in the planter seem to benefit from it. It needs to be repaired to get the water away from the house though, the sump pump has been working overtime to keep things dry in the basement.

I think it’s kind of odd that the water is pouring out from the downspout end of the gutter. I’m guessing it’s plugged with leaves or something, I’ll probably have to get up there with the ladder on Saturday and see what’s really going on with it.

Also near the end of the video you can see where the blue stone pavers have been pulled up in preparation for the placement of a new concrete sidewalk. I found someone in the area who was working on a stone wall and they called up and helped me get rid of this bluestone. I still have some big bluestone curb and slab pieces sitting around, so if you’re in the mid-hudson area and interested let me know.

Anyways, heres the thunderstorm video, if you can’t see the embedded YouTube video below, just click the link to go directly to YouTube to watch it, you won’t leave the site.

If you enjoy thunder storm videos, check out my YouTube channel on the right. I have a few from the last couple of years posted there that you may enjoy watching.

Some Site Updates, Scott’s PatchMaster, Lasers, and Helicopters

JonC — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:08:42 +0000

It’s raining tonight again. It’s really been crazy, like it should be Spring right now and not summer. For the last two weeks we’ve had almost non-stop rain, perhaps one or two days without it. The Scott’s Patchmaster is doing great, but it’s not really getting a chance to get it’s roots deep in the ground and form a solid mat due to all of the available water from rain, as a result the ground is a bit squishy over there still. I keep a jar out on one of the planters so I can see how much it rains. In one 24 hour period I measured almost 3 inches of rain! Crazy weather!

There’s a few changes coming to the Thaltech.com website, it won’t affect this blog for the most part, but is part of me wanting to unify all of my various hobbies into something easily manageable and search-able.

I’ve started updating some of the other pages on this website. My most visited site, my current Jon’s Homebuilt Lasers , is slowly being transitioned over to Jon’s Commercial, Industrial and Homebuilt Lasers which will me in the format of a new CMS / Blogging style which closely mirrors the appearance of this site. I plan on getting some things going with that hobby in a month or two and wanted a site which was easy to update, as well as I am interested in merging appearance and access on my websites.

Also in transition at this time is my current Jon’s Helis website. I also be converting my rocket site over as well as creating a new one specifically for my high voltage projects and experiments.

When all is said and done I will replace the main Thaltech Webpage with a blog type interface as well which will receive general ‘stuff’ type posts and also receive updates from each of the partitioned sites. This will allow me to have all of my projects and work and hobbies and such indexed on the main URL for my website, providing for my own little gateway into things.

You may ask why I’d want to make everything completely separate, rather than just running one giant blog. For one I want to individually theme each site towards people who have interest in those specific items, without them having to dig through a ton of unrelated content. Additionally I like to keep things segmented for my own purposes.

Weekend Update: Lawns and Scott’s Patchmaster (28 day report)

JonC — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:17:56 +0000

This is just a quick update on things. The Scott’s Patchmaster is now right at 28 days and is growing nicely. We’ve had a huge amount of rain here in the NE the last week so that certainly hasn’t hurt things by keeping the patch mulch wet. My only fear is that the weather will go from very wet to super hot and dry with no reasonable transition, which may keep the grass from developing deep roots and result in it getting burnt out in the heat. All you can do at that point is try to keep it wet.

I only got one picture of the patch, but it turned out blurry as it was late at night. I will try to update with a newer photo on Monday or Tuesday if you’re interested in seeing how 4 weeks looks (Update: Good photos at the bottom of this post!) . It looks a lot like the last photos in the 21 Day Scott’s Patchmaster post just a lot more dense than before. Also, it’s very green and makes the rest of the lawn look terrible (but it really is terrible so that’s kind of to be expected). Hopefully we will get to over-seed or cut out the ‘original’ lawn and get some new fresh grass going there, rather than clover, once summer breaks.

I’m a bit concerned about the peninsula lawn which was seeded from scratch with just plain grass seed, mulching material and starter fertilizer. The new grass there has not grown a lot, if at all, since last week and looks kind of odd and lighter colored. In fact now that we’ve gone a full year that section of the lawn is dying out. There’s simply not enough fertility in the soil as it’s mostly sand and keeps leaching out. I don’t have the willpower to fertilize the lawn every 3-4 weeks so I think Spring 2011 I am going to start over by tilling in some good quality soil to the junk that is there now. The new grass in other sections I planted from scratch has grown great, several inches a week and they received exactly the same treatments and similar exposure to rain and sunshine. The soil in those areas is of a much different quality, not sandy at all. The soil on the peninsula is very sandy, so much so we tilled in about 15 bales of peat moss to the 1800 square feet area to try and help it retain moisture and nutrients, and on top of that we’ve had huge amount of rain recently. It’s possible that the rain is just washing the nutrients out of the soil. We put a small amount of fertilizer on Saturday, about 1/4 the amount of a normal fertilizing, to see how the grass responded. The last two nights, though, we’ve gotten long(hours and hours) torrential downpours once again. I’m not sure what to do here but I will have to do some reading to find out whats going on.

I’m hoping it’s not that the soil is draining -too- well and letting the nutrients wash out. I’m not sure of a good solution to that other than ripping up the lawn again in fall, mixing in good quality soil with the sandy soil and then replanting the whole thing, which would be a major pain in the neck.

It’s going to be a busy week, but I’ll try to get some new posts in. I’m in the process of converting my Laser and High Voltage and Hobby websites over to word press and wordpressifying all the existing pages. I’m really happy with WordPress as it makes it so easy to update and modify pages and has a huge number of plugins to make life easy, doing so has given me the urge to get back into my other hobbies!

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

Update:(September 9,2010) It’s been over a year since I posted this 28 day update and I must say that the areas of the lawn which were patched with the PatchMaster are looking pretty good and like they belong in the lawn. I will add in some additional photos so you can see the results, but basically it will just be ‘It looks like the rest of the lawn.’ which is what the goal was going into this whole lawn restoration project. My overall experience is that if you have the right weather conditions, or you are willing to make sure it stays watered and fed, it is a suitable product for this purpose. Remember, the end of August and early September is a great time of year to get some new grass started because it will have the Fall and Spring to become strong before having to endure the next Summer. Good luck and please share your success or failures with this product.

Scott’s PatchMaster 21 Day Update

JonC — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:32:11 +0000

I wanted to provide some photo’s of the Scott’s Patch Master over time. It has been a few weeks now since I put the paper/seed/fertilizer mix down on the blank spot, and there is grass growing. It will take some time to fully fill in, but if it survives the summer which is now upon us, I think it will do ok.

There are quite a few different patch ‘solutions’ out there for fixing holes in lawns and trying to make them blend. The advantages that a lot of these have over ‘plain’ seed is that they include some kind of recycled paper mulch to help retain water and keep the seed wet. When you first put down grass seed it must remain constantly. If the seed starts to germinate, and then dries out, it will die. With these patch mixes, the mulch or paper will help retain the water, and it will also help keep the soil from drying out beneath it. However, there is no patch mix that will work if you completely neglect it. We mowed the patch to about 3 inches after the 21 days.

If you remember, I put the patch on about May 18th, so up to today, June 7th, that gives us a total of 21 days now that it has been ‘doing it’s thing’. Click on the photos below, when they open up you can use the arrows to move back and forth through them. Each photo is titled with the date and day number information.

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts and don’t forget the 28 Day Update! A lot of folks find this update and miss the last one!

Lawn Watch 2009 – First Scott’s PatchMaster Update

JonC — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:18:03 +0000

A couple of days ago we posted pictures of the lawn where we had done the Scott’s PatchMaster patch mix over some new topsoil we put down when we were trying to level a large low spot in the lawn. There was no grass to be seen, but I said it would pop up any day now.

Well we went out today and and behold there are now grass chutes popping up all over the place in that area. Within a week it should be looking pretty green and grassy as long as it is kept wet. The area has been getting water twice a day, but it could probably use it at least 3 times a day, I’m just always running short on time in the mornings. So even with less than perfect attention, it’s sprouting! Check out the photos. I’ll continue updating as things progress. Total time from Scotts PatchMaster mix to sprouting was ~7.5 days.

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

Lawn Watch 2009 tense music (1 of 2 posts today)

JonC — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:16:47 +0000

Okay, I bought some more Scott’s QuickPatch for part of the left side lawn I leveled off with topsoil and applied it tonight. I put the soil down a week or so ago and we had a major rainstorm which I helped level it out and make it part of the yard. I put weed and feed down about a week ago and was hoping that the weeds would be dead, but they’re not. Progress cannot be impeded, we’ll take care of the weeds later. I’ve sharpened up some nail clippers for Bryn so he can get the weeds.

Hopefully in a week there will be sprouts and in short time there will be lawn. I love how this stuff works, but it really really makes me want to build a home-owner sized hydro-seeder over the summer.

You can flip through the photos and see the stages from: Topsoil -> Crushing up the compressed quickpatch -> applied quickpatch -> watered quickpatch.

Oh please! contain your excitement, don’t crowd. The pics are as exciting as watching grass grow, but I’ll take photo’s twice a week and provide a post in about 2 months with all of the ‘progress’ photos together so you can see the lawn sprout, become infested with weeds, and then get razed with a large blowtorch!

Sorry about pics being out of order, my image viewer app plugin is a dimwit.

This Weekend’s Yard Report

JonC — Sat, 16 May 2009 22:16:29 +0000

Things seem to be going good all around out here. I mowed the peninsula lawn this weekend for the first time since planting the grass and it looks great. It’s still thin but now that it’s gotten more sun absorbing leafy surface area going and I added the starter fertilizer it’s really been picking up pace. With any luck this lawn will be established before the weather gets too hot, but I’m not sure. We’ve only been watering it every 2 days using the timer lately. It’s still bright and green and seems to be thriving. Additionally we’ve gotten rain over the past two weeks which helps save money on water, etc.

The lawn on the back yard hill is growing in okay, I was hoping it would have been thicker but that doesn’t seem to be the case. If I could have gotten this or the peninsula to grow in as fast and thick as that Scott’s quick patch (PatchMaster(tm)) stuff I’d have been happy. Maybe I need to look into hydro-seeding for any future lawn work ( DIY Hydro-seeder anyone? ) . The Scott’s quick patch is basically hydro-seeding ingredients minus the water from what I saw on the bag. I saw a spot down the road where the town had cut up some big 8-12 foot wide swaths of land to do fire hydrant work, then hydroseeded when done. That was 2 weeks ago and the grass is already growing really fast there.

I also have some more photos of the Iris flowers. The second one looks like it’s sticking it’s tongue out Say ahhhh!

Additionally are the photo’s of something special brewing in ‘Mom’s Sunshine Garden’ I was worried they weren’t going to come up, but they bloomed fairly quick. It appears something has been nibbling them, but with the number of bunnies I’ve seen around here, I hope it’s them and not bugs!

And finally you can see a couple of herbs from the garden planter. The first one is Sage and the second one is Parsley.

Leveling the Uneven Yard

JonC — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:45:37 +0000

I spent some time preparing the other (left) side yard for more leveling out. When I say leveling I just mean I’m trying to get the humps and dips out of the terrain that make it difficult to mow and maintain. The sunken areas also tend to pool water and just don’t look appealing in general. In these yards around the house the average dips have been around 3-6 feet in diameter and anywhere from a few inches to almost a foot deep in extreme cases.

The yard itself continues to maintain it’s overall terrain following shape due to the fact the house sits on a blue stone ridge, and short of borrowing an excavator for a week, it will not become flat. Although that IS a project for another year or two down the road! If you look at the panorama photo a post down you will see the whole wooded area on the left which we want to excavate and push into the valley behind the house. This will result in a flatter yard, at the first floor level of the house all around the house with the bonus of using the removed material to build up a nice slope into the valley area behind the house. Currently if you stand on the hill which is RIGHT BEHIND the house, you’re standing at a second story height.

I’ve also been adding soil and raising/smoothing the yard in areas where large veins or pieces of bluestone from the bluestone ridge are poking up through the surface just a little. Removal, at this time, is not possible without an excavator or backhoe.

Some of the prep for leveling out the area was using some of the remaining 5 cubic yards of topsoil I had delivered for filling in one hole. I also went out and laid down some weed and feed since that side of the yard is covered in clover, broad leaf weeds and other things that don’t belong in a lawn. I figured I might as well disfigure the ‘decent’ look of the lawn now, rather than just letting it grow wild, it will give me a better idea of the turf areas we may want to save, and other areas which are so engulfed in weeds they’re better off mowed short and covered in topsoil if needed.

From past experience ( a couple of weeks ago ), I decided to put the top soil down and then give it a little time and a few rain showers to settle. If settles back into the shape of the original dip/sunken area, we’ll add more topsoil and let it settle again before finally planting the grass. We may hold off until September to plant any seed in that area as we’re quickly approaching June, July and August, the hot months for us in the NE US.

Working to Rebuild a Lawn in Poor Condition

JonC — Sat, 09 May 2009 21:42:36 +0000

I took some more photos on the progress of the lawns which we planted a while back. The peninsula area of the yard seems to be growing alright, although I had expected that maybe it would be further along in it’s growth phase. I just need to be patient I guess, grass will take it’s own time to sprout. The lawns current condition is certainly an improvement the moss mess that it used to be!

I took photo’s of the lawn patch on the area we dug up for the drain pipe from the gutters and then replanted. I bought some of the Scott’s PatchMaster and applied it and kept it watered and damp. It sat for a little while doing nothing and I was started to get frustrated with it thinking that the patch would never grow in and then it grew rapidly with little green shoots popping up all over the place seemingly overnight. The Patchmaster might not be such a bad product after all!

The area of the property where we filled in the big sunken spots in the ground with fresh topsoil and used the brown germinating mats over the grass seed seems to be doing okay. Again, I would like to see faster growth but I’ll just have to be patient and keep myself contained

I recorded a video of one of the modified square spray sprinklers sucking water out of the lawn! Well, not really, but due to the shutter/frame rate of the camera, it looks as if things are moving backwards at points. Check out the modification at the link there, it’s semi-high tech and works great!

Solar Power Landscape Lighting and Weeding the Yard

JonC — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:16:49 +0000

It’s only been a few days but spring is really kicking into full gear. The lawn has been growing, I added some solar powered landscape lighting around the peninsula where the lawn has been growing, additionally I’ve been working on weeding the lawn and the upper ridge and around the planter. Here are some progress photos.

Images are now clickable for full size (from this post onward)

Leveling the Yard a Bit

JonC — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:39:52 +0000

In the back yard there were some HUGE dips and sags in the soil which made the area look like a small association of rolling hills. Additionally the blue stone which the property sits on was poking up through certain areas. This last weekend I ordered 5 cubic yards of topsoil and we filled in the holes quite a bit and planted new grass for that area. We tried something different with this area, getting seed germinating mats made out of some kind of wood fiber. We’re going to see how those work out for their intended purpose. The mats are biodegradable so you don’t have to rake them out of the lawn, and the stakes are also biodegradable.

Here’s the view from ‘street side’ look back into the back yard.

New topsoil on the back yard areas that had huge huge dips in them.

Here’s a view of the same area looking from the barn towards the planter.

Shot from the back yard by the barn to the planter.

Here’s how it looks with the mat installed.

Back yard fill with seed germination mat

Jon's Home Blog » grass

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