Boy got the green light from the doctor today. No more sling. His broken collar bone is healing nicely. He can run and play but for the next four weeks no more falling down or diving for soccer balls and hitting posts. Ouch! With today being a minimum day at school I figured it would be more disruptive to the class to bring him back to school so he got to play hooky today. Lucky him. First we went to Sam's Club. We only bought a few things because I like Costco better for the most part. Then we went to Costco. I was specifically looking for the weed blocker fabric that's 4'x220'. Each store had a different brand but both were name brands. Costco was four dollars more so Sam's would have been the better choice. I didn't feel like going back to Sam's so it will have to wait until next time I'm in that part of the city. I had a $117.42 check from Costco. Every year they send me a check, the amount depends on how much you spend during the year. Since I was planning on spending about $60 of it on the weed blocker plus some other groceries Boy and I just sort of roamed the store and bought a bunch of groceries, including some things that I normally don't buy (like a 4 pound bag of chocolate chips). I didn't keep track of the money we spent. He's show me stuff and on almost everything I said no. He wanted junk food. I bought a three pound bag of tortilla chips and the chocolate chips. That's about as junk food as he was going to get out of me. They had a five pound bag of tortilla chips for only fifty cents more but I didn't buy it. It's going to take a lot of effort to go through the three pounds and will probably have some end up as part of my "bread crumbs". We went to the checkout line and I was shocked when the total price came up. $117.10. I had thirty-two cents left out of my $117.42 check. Nothing like a cart of free food. Wow! Of course I still have to go to Sam's and spend $60 but I'm still impressed.
On the way home we stopped off at the nursery. I wanted to get a couple more peach trees. I have two peach trees and they are both early producers: the peaches are ripe in June. The two trees I bought today ripen in mid August through the beginning of September. I'll get them in the ground this weekend. I also bought some in-line hose shut off valves for the drip. For the trees out front I have one 200' length of hose and each tree has its own line that T's into the hose. I turn the hose on and the 11 trees all get watered at the same time. In about 15 minutes they've gotten enough water that I can turn the hose off. The raspberries were also attached to this hose. Well, 11 T's was all the hose could support. This 12th wasn't getting an adequate supply of water. No use planting 10 raspberry plants if you are not going to give them any water.
I'm also going to plant the two new trees out front which means even more trees are going to be T'd off the main line. At some point I'm going to have to run a second main line since I'd like to plant more trees out front and I'm not going to want to have to turn on and off each t each time. If I run two hoses I can leave the T's open most of the time because either hose A or hose B will be on. The front is an area about 150'x200'. I can't plant anything right down the middle because there's a leach line there but the rest of that pasture area can use more trees. I put panels around each individual tree so the sheep can't get to the tree. They can stick their heads through the panels and eat the grass on the ground but can't get to the branches to strip them clean.
There are two different kinds of in-line valves: the easy to use and the hard to use. Of course the nursery didn't have the easy to use. The easy to use has small barbs that you push into the hose and a ring that you push onto the hose and slide it on top of the barb to tighten it. It's easy to use. The type I bought was the compression type that you just wiggle the hose into the end of the valve. In hot weather it's pretty easy to do because the hose is warm and will easily squeeze into the open end of the valve. Not when it's cool outside. The hose is stiff and doesn't want to squeeze in at all. It was a sight watching me fight with a little hose. It took me about an hour to put those 11 T's in. My shoulder and upper arms are really sore. The easy T's would have taken 15 minutes and I wouldn't be even the tiniest bit sore. Oh well. Since I didn't want to go to an irrigation store I just bought what they had. Neither Lowe's nor Home Depot carry what I needed. I'm dreaming of a nice shot of something to take away the aches but not tonight. A hot cup of tea will have to do. Since I goofed off half of the day I have to work more tonight. Tomorrow will also be a full workday, other than a stop at my favorite surplus store on my way up the hill.
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