Converting the fountain into a garden, part 1

One of the features of our homestead is a fountain with a flower-girl statue, that was added by a previous owner.

Here’s a GIF of the fountain from 2014:

However, we rarely ran the fountain, as it tended to spray water outside the pool, and leaked, so we had to keep topping it up. Plus, after a few years the electrical supply became unreliable, popping the GFCI increasingly frequently. And without running the fountain, the pool became a breeding ground of mosquitos and such.

So, we decided to replace the pool with a garden.

Here’s the pump in the base of the fountain, which I’ve disconnected:

I had the idea of using the fountain tube to water plants in the middle basin of the fountain, so I temporarily connected a hose to check that that would be feasible:

Yep; here’s a GIF of the fountain working from that hose:

That basin has a drain hole, so it won’t fill up with water when we put soil and plants there (the drain is still plugged in that GIF).

So, after checking that, the next step was to add a new tap for irrigation tubing to the fountain. I could have connected to the existing tap next to the fountain, but I wanted to have the tubing enter the fountain from the back, where it wouldn’t be visible from the house or deck. The garden to the right of the fountain doesn’t already have a tap, so I wanted to add one.

I knew from a previous plumbing project that there is a pipe under that garden. Here’s a picture from 2015 of an overly complex piping system I added for the flowerbeds (the tap on the left is to attach a water timer and short hose to the nearby female port, enabling timed watering, with a bypass valve too). The pipe at the top goes under the garden next to the fountain:

Here’s that location now; you can see the short white hose, though there isn’t a timer connected currently:

When I dug down in the garden next to the fountain, I found the pipe in the expected location:

I turned off the garden water supply, then cut the pipe (a little water drained out):

Then I added a tap:

The next day (allowing time for the adhesive to cure) I turned the water back on, checked for leaks, then filled the hole:

The next step was to drill a hole through the base of the fountain wall, so I could have the irrigation tubing tidily go through the wall rather than over it. To do that, I previously purchased a rather large 1 inch by 16 inch masonry drill bit:

Here’s the drill bit in my driver:

Though after a while I switched to a dedicated drill. It took over an hour to get through the concrete-filled block of the wall:

The hole:

Then I added an irrigation pipe from the new tap through the hole:

Inside the fountain pool, I added a T-junction to the irrigation pipe, with one fork going to the fountain tubing, the other for sprinkler emitters for the bottom level:

That done, I brought several loads of scoria to add at the bottom as a drainage layer:

Thusly:

We inherited a large pile of scoria over near the beehives; still lots left:

Then I did a couple loads of soil:

Starting the soil layer:

That’s all I had time and energy for. I will probably finish adding the soil next weekend, weather permitting.

It was quite a workout; don’t need a gym when you have a homestead!