Shade garden water feature up and running

Last weekend, in the nick of time for our open garden day tomorrow, my husband John finally got his carved granite water feature running. There's a picture in this post of the granite being put into place with a Bobcat machine, a job that got done last fall.

John carved a basin for the water into the big round piece of granite, and was able to custom-order the squared piece of granite - which came from China. He had his supplier bore a hole through its length for the water to come up.

The water now comes out of a piece of copper plumbing tubing. This looks very simple and elegant, but it took many hours to work out all the wrinkles of the pump installation. (Water features are never as easy as the garden magazines make them look.)

This piece is John's take on a Japanese-style fountain. It turned out very well, and has already become a magnet for birds and other garden critters, including our Toby-dog, who treats it as his personal water fountain.

More on water features in my next post: my sweetie has been creative, and very busy, but we now have four water features up and running.

Our weekend projects: could be John Deere ads

We finally placed another one of my husband John's carved stone pieces. It's a water feature made out of a piece of polished black slate. It has a hole drilled through its length for water to come bubbling out the top.

There was a lot of trial and error to set it up. It has a plastic basin reservior that's sunk into the ground, but the first basin John tried was too small, and too much water spilled outside the basin so it couldn't be recirculated. Just the situation for running the pump dry.

We dug a bigger hole and installed a larger basin, and now the water feature is finally running. All we need to finish the project is more pea gravel to cover up the black plastic top. I'll post a picture once that is done later this week.

Our tractor has a front-end loader, which can be removed and forks put on. Both the loader and forks are hugely useful.

A couple of weeks ago, we used the forks to move a large balled and burlapped crabapple to its planting spot. I don't know how we could manage a lot of the jobs around here without our trusty John Deere. The same goes for my handy husband!

A couple of weeks ago I used the tractor bucket to mix up all the potting soil to plant up my too many containers.