Grass cutter re-engineered (2021, March 22)

Know these grass cutters with a nylon wire? Endlessly the wire gets entangled in a big knot, so you need to load new wire onto the spool. Was about to throw this damn machine in the bin. Made in China, obviously.

Engineer Jansen thought about replacing the coil of nylon wire with a length of iron wire, but decided against that, for safety reasons.

Here is his other solution, that works *extremely* well, actually. (Obviously.) Just a length of cutter wire, and a knot. More than 30 minutes of undisturbed mowing has been achieved.

Mango (2021, March 22)

In the background you can see the big irrigation water supply pipes. When in use, every few weeks in summer, a lot of water spills. Mangos love spilled irrigation water!

And we love mangos that love spilled irrigation water!

Mango 3. And irrigation. (Mango 4 easily added...)

Irrigation... (2021, March 10)

You haul 20 tons and what do you get...

Plastic irrigation tubes don’t like sun, so into the ground they go.
It has been raining a few days, so the soil is nice and soft, so this is the chance to get this done...

Yummy yucca (March 9, 2021)

New yucca, variegated, beautiful!

Creepy rosemary (March 4 2021)

40 creeping rosemary, 20 grey lavender, 20 green lavender, to plant around trees to keep weeds out, and the sun off the irrigation system tubes. Work work work.

Riego Continuado Continuado

The irrigation system. Each tree has a ring of 16mm irrigation tube with 3 pin pricks to let water drip out. Well, after a week it doesn’t. The holes are too small, and clog up. Or, plastic creeps, and the holes close again.

Engineer Jansen is now switching to Gardena Micro drip. Gardena wants you to use them as in the picture below, stuck into the end of their proprietary 4.6 mm irigation tubes. As you can see the drippers have a thread, followed by a tapered thing.

The good news is that a 4.5 mm hole in the 16 mm tubes fits this gap quite nicely. The wall of the tubes snap right between the taper and the nut, so the drippers sit tight. The 4.5 mm hole simply is made by hand and a 4.5 mm drill. Each tree gets 3, each bougainvillea 1.

Inside the dripper there is a small plastic cylinder that moves and sort of regulates the dripping. I hope this does not clog up...

Gardena has a whole collection of thingies in their Micro-Drip™ system. The orange drippers yield 2 liter per hour, the black ones 4 l/h. As I want the water to be spread a bit I give each tree 3 orange drippers. Ony the very big trees (Paulownia) get 4 l/h drippers. 

200 drippers (25 for €6,80, which is cheap, they're double in NL!). That is 200 holes punched with a tool I made from a block of wood and a drill, inserted by hand, give it a turn, then use the pipe wrench to screw it in, then push it past the wedge. Three days hard work. Pff. Now I only need to dig in the tubes in the ground, as plastic tubes and Andalucían sun are not a great match.

Have a look at all the various drippers, sprayers, etc etc, see below, or  on https://www.gardena.com/uk/products/watering/micro-drip/