A Clever Apartment Irrigation System

Our summer home is an apartment near Portland, Oregon. It is quite lovely and ecological, next to a chain of small lakes with walking and biking trails connecting it to a cute little village. This is a modern “planned community” with everything you need connected by scenic trails around the lakes, along a flowing stream, and through beautiful woods. You can walk or ride your bike or wheelchair to get to groceries and many needed services. The theory is that you really don’t need a car to get around. The reality is hahahaha. This is Oregon, after all, and if you don’t mind carting bags of groceries home in a pouring rain every other day, then this place lives up to its “planned” idea. If you are coming down with, or already have pneumonia or a raging urinary infection, not to worry. You can walk to a clinic and see a doctor, go across the parking lot and get your prescriptions filled, then happily walk back home without ever having to add to global warming by driving your car. You’d better have a large golf umbrella with you, though.

Here is a photo of the front of our apartment. We have the downstairs corner unit overlooking one of the lakes and some idyllic woods.

The green bushes and trees are part of the permanent landscaping – planted and maintained by our apartment complex management. All the plants and flowers, herbs, and gee-gaws on our patio are our own addition. I also put out containers of annual flowers in amongst the shrubbery to make the place look pretty. We are not supposed to plant anything permanently into the grounds around the apartment, thus I use container planters.

The problem we have encountered with this arrangement is that there is no outside faucet where we could attach a hose for watering our plants, and it can take about 10 trips outside to water everything. Our apartment has a west-facing exposure which means we get full, hot sun all the way from about noon until the sun finally sets around 9:00 PM in the summers. About the end of June, the incessant rain stops and it can get very hot and dry. Also, even when it rains, the plants on our patio don’t get very wet because of the overhang from the balcony above us. The plants must get watered every day or they cook.

The other problem we needed to solve was how to have our plants get watered if we were gone over a weekend, or on longer trips to the Coast, or to visit friends and family. One year, I hired the apartment’s maintenance man who came in on his own time after his day-job here and watered everything. He has now moved on so that is no longer an option.

Paul solved the problem of us not having any faucet access for a hose by replacing our kitchen faucet with a fancy upgrade (at our own expense) which had a spray attachment that could be unscrewed and a hose connector attached to it. We could then attach and run a hose from our kitchen faucet down our living room hallway and out onto our patio where we could water all the plants using an adjustable hose nozzle.

Here is a photo of the sink faucet sprayer part that Paul installed to replace the cheesy faucet that came with the apartment.

The next photo shows the sprayer unscrewed from the braided hose that pulls out of the faucet so you can use the sprayer attachment.

And here is the hose as it is attached to the faucet using Paul’s adapter so it is ready to use.

The hose we are using as of this year is one of those Pocket Hoses as seen on TV advertisements. It stays all collapsed and scrunched up and fits in a small bag when not in use, then when you hook it up and turn on the water, it expands out to a regular-sized hose. We screwed two of them together for easier use. It works so much better than having a large, bulky coiled up plastic or rubber hose taking up valuable space on your porch.

Many times we have wished that when they built these nice apartments that they had put a hose faucet on each patio. We’ve thought they could have foreseen that residents would want to put out planters of flowers, herbs, patio tomatoes, and the like, and they’d need to be watered. I suppose they figured that people on the balconies above might inadvertently rain down water off their balconies onto the people below them. This would be a problem. They do have an outdoor receptacle on each patio so that a person can plug in patio lights. I used this for several years with a timer, but now I use only solar-powered lighting which needs no electricity nor a timer.

With the problem of how to get water out to the patio solved by the Pocket Hose, we still had the problem of how we’d get our plants watered when we are gone. We have very nice, friendly neighbors, but it was way too much to ask of someone to make 10 or more trips from their apartment to ours carrying large containers of water for our plants. We needed to think of something else.

My idea was to have some sort of drip irrigation system but the problem was having a water source. Paul came up with the idea of having a large water reservoir on the patio, with a pump and a timer on it and a series of drip irrigation hoses going to each plant. Unfortunately, he calculated how big this reservoir would need to be in order to put about 1 gallon of water on each plant once per day as a start. He came up with needing about a 50-gallon container which is about the size of a commercial 55-gallon drum!

We decided to go to places like farm supply stores and Home Depot and Lowe’s and just look at all the container alternatives available that we could adapt for our ideas. At a farm supply store, we found a 32-gallon, very sturdy Rubbermaid trash container that looked like it would fit perfectly on the back of our patio next to our bar-b-que grill. It was a dark green with a grey, tight-fitting lid. It held a lot of water and looked like it would work just fine. Here you see it after Paul bored a hole in the bottom of it and attached a fitting.

At this point, Paul completely took over the irrigation project. For those of you that don’t know Paul, he is a PhD nuclear physicist with a Masters in Electrical Engineering. He’s a Licensed Professional Engineer, as well. Besides being a Professor of Physics and Astronomy, he used to work part time at the National Super-Conducting Cyclotron Laboratory in Michigan designing the remote electrical controls which ran the beam lines at the Cyclotron. So designing a simple irrigation system is well within his reach.

Here is our dining room table at the start of the design project. Paul was in his parts-acquiring phase.

He was stacking boxed system parts on top of our computer printer.

First he added a water pump to the trash can connection using all manner of gaskets and connectors and high-pressure hoses, etc..

He then wired up the irrigation timing unit to the pump. The top box here in the next photo is the actual Orbit irrigation timer, and the bottom water-proof box contains a pump start relay. (Is your head exploding yet?)

He decided that the pressure wouldn’t be high enough to flow through all the irrigation tubing in an even fashion, so he added a pressurized water expansion tank (the blue thingy) which is like what you have on top of your home water heater. The white-lidded plastic box behind the trash can/water reservoir keeps the rain off of the pump. These mechanical devices will be artfully camouflaged in the future.

From the expansion tank he ran all the irrigation tubing along the outside edge of the patio, and using T-connectors ran drip flags to each of the plants. He put different-sized dripper heads on each plant according to its size. For instance, on a very large pot, he would put a large flag-dripper so that it got more water in the same amount of time than the small pot of herbs sitting next to it.

Here’s a photo of Paul hooking up all the tubing.

I have a bird bath just outside our patio which we hooked into the system so it would keep the bird bath filled. When the system comes on to water the plants, it also tops off the bird bath. LOTS of birds use the bird bath so it is an important part of my landscaping features. I have up thistle-seed feeders and a hummingbird feeder, as well. I love to attract and watch all the pretty birds that live around here. Many butterflies visit the colorful flowers.

As you can see in the first photo showing the scene across the front of our apartment, there are flowers all across the front of our patio, guest room, and our bedroom has the hanging Fuchsia and a bird feeder at the far end. There are irrigation lines going to all these flowers, as well.

Here is a view of the inside corner of our patio and you can see some of the irrigation lines among the plants.

Here’s a photo of our West Highland Terrier, Yuki, watching Paul hook up the drip line to the Fuchsia outside our bedroom window.

Our system is up and running perfectly. Paul set the timer to come on every evening at 8 PM and to run for a full 5 minutes. Later on in the season, another couple weeks away, when the sun is blazing and the temperatures are higher, we will add a 5-minute morning cycle to the watering schedule so the flowers stay well-hydrated all day. Paul has been measuring the amount of water used out of our 32-gallon reservoir every day, and his calculations show that we can have the plants watered for 5-6 days if we go away that long. The longest we are planning to be gone this summer is a 4-day stretch, so we will have plenty of water for the plants during the time we are gone. He now fills the giant reservoir trash can using the Pocket Hose about once per week, more often if we increase the watering.

We’ve been using a plant moisture meter to check the plants every afternoon to see how our watering schedule is working out, and so far, it has been registering enough residual moisture to stay healthy at our current once-per-day watering cycle.

This irrigation solution for adapting to an apartment living situation has worked out wonderfully well. I am very happy with it. However, when I went to set up to pay bills at the end of this month today, I noticed a rather large jump in our Visa card bill. So I pulled out our June file folder and sorted through it, removing all the receipts pertaining to this irrigation project.

Yikes!! $560.00!! My fancy physicist-electrical-engineer-cyclotron-whiz designed and built an irrigation system worthy of the Space Shuttle. I had NO idea it was going to cost this kind of money to water my patio flowers! But I can’t complain. I love not having to schlepp gallons of water from my faucet to all those plants every day, and then worry and stress over trying to figure out how to get them watered when we are gone. He solved all those problems. I just didn’t know it would cost anywhere near this much.

I love being married to a nerd. 🙂

Beast

For our Christmas 2012 present, our sons went together and gave Paul and me a gift certificate to Portland’s renown restaurant called Beast. As you can probably tell from the amount on the gift certificate, this is no ordinary restaurant. Dinner at Beast is an event.

Naomi Pomeroy, winner of Food & Wine Magazines Best New Chef in America 2009 and a James Beard Award finalist, is the heart and soul behind Beast. Naomi and her sous chef Mika Paredes, preside over the small, cozy venue serving 2 communal tables inside seating 24, and weather permitting, 2 tables outside which seat 4 more. Last night, 2 lucky diners also sat at the long, butcher block prep table where some of the preparation and the plating action happens.

The menu at Beast is set up as a six-course prix-fixe dinner with an optional wine paring for an extra charge. The menu changes every week on Tuesday and reflects dishes that use the freshest ingredients in season from local farms and markets. The ingredients are organic and are of the highest quality obtainable. We chose to have the wine pairing with our dinner and we chose the 6 PM seating as opposed to the 8:45 seating. Dinners last approximately 2 1/2 hours. Arriving late isn’t an option. Plan to show up just a few minutes early, but never late.

Here is the listing of dinner courses and wine pairings for the dinner we had last night, June 7th.

Our first course was the Asparagus Veloute with the Shrimp Toast with Chive Blossom.

The asparagus veloute was garnished with tarragon/chive oil and sprinkled with fresh chive blossoms. The shrimp toast was crunchy on the bottom with a rich fresh shrimp flavor from the shrimp under the melted cheese. This course was perfectly paired with a lightly-chilled crisp, dry, green-peppery Gruner Veltliner from the Kamptal region of Austria. This was a perfect course to set the bar for rest to come!

The table was cleared and reset for the next course – the Charcuterie Plate.

Naomi explained that we should begin eating this course with the Chicken Liver Mousse with pickled shallot on the leaf-lard cracker sitting at about ‘one o’clock’ on the plate, and work our way clockwise using the herb salad in the center in between the items. The salad was made of fresh, baby herbs, edible flowers, slivered pickled onions, fennel, and colorful, paper-thin slices of beet. The green strawberry sitting on a slice of pickled beet was very creative. The strawberry was pickled and peppery and very lightly sweet. Who knew a green strawberry could taste so good?

Next was the steak tartare topped with a quail egg on a thin toast. Delicious – rich and flavorfully ‘beefy’ from local grass-fed cattle. Sitting next to this at the bottom of the plate were two thin slices of air-dried grass-fed beef.

Next was the Rabbit Rillette. Rillettes are sort of like a confit, usually cooked with some added duck fat or leaf lard to compensate for rabbit meat’s natural dryness, then formed into a small triangle shape. It can be eaten on toast or thin crackers like you’d eat a pate.

Next was a tiny gherkin sitting in some stone-ground mustard with a wasabi-like kick to it, then there were some slices of house-cured duck breast prosciutto. Lastly came the unctuous bite of the foie-gras bon-bon topped with a small square of sauternes gelee. The tiny bon-bon was made of shortbread. Oh, my! So many incredibly delicious flavors, one right after the other, each setting the stage for the next rich bite.

The wine selected for this course was a dry, flinty Riesling from Germany. It was ever so lightly sweet – the perfect counterpoint to the richness of the charcuterie.

The table was again cleared and prepared with a complete fresh setting – plates, silverware, wine glasses, etc. for the next course. At this point, we were served a palate-cleanser of a small serving of fresh sugar-snap pea sorbet with citrus. Don’t look for this at Dairy Queen. You might find something like it at Portland’s Salt & Straw, however.

It was deliciously refreshing – a true palate-cleanser.

The next course consisted of the Seared Squab Breast & Confit Leg with Smoked Pickled Onions, Fava Bean puree, Confit Potatoes, and Porcini Mushrooms. It was sprinkled with sage blossoms for a splash of color.

The aroma from this dish was indescribable. We were instructed to pick up the pieces of squab and nibble every last bit of goodness off of the bones. It was difficult to cut all the delicious meat off even using the efficient Laguoile steak knives that were provided. It was a strange feeling holding on to the little confit leg by its tiny claw. Paul and I both would have preferred to have our squab breasts cooked a little bit more than just seared, but this is our culinary failing – not anything lacking from Beast. By pure culinary standards, it was cooked perfectly.

The wine pairing with the squab was a French Chinon with cherry and herbal notes from a small, organic vineyard in the Loire Valley of France.

Here is a shot of the preparation of the upcoming course at the huge butcher block counter. Having the guests seated at tables around this area gave the whole dining experience a warm homey feel to the dinner. It was like eating at your grandmother’s house. You could see and hear the preparation of the courses and inhale the aromas in anticipation of what was coming next.

By the way, I loved the way they had these cool little quotes, sayings, and recipes written on the chalkboard walls.

The next course switched gears to a purely vegetarian delight. We were served a Caramelized Lentil Samosa with a Nigella Seed Cream, with a salad mix of shredded snap peas, celery, and preserved lemon. It also had some fresh mint leaves mixed in and was sprinkled with Borage flowers.

Gorgeous! And a delicious change of flavors and content from the meat courses. Here is a photo of what the inside of the samosa looked like.

This was served with a light, dry Rose from the Isle of Corsica, France. The presentation was just gorgeous, as I’m sure you would agree.

Here is a photo of our table. There were four couples at our table.

Although our table-mates were complete strangers, we still had some pleasant interactions with them yet still felt we had privacy for our own conversation.

Our fifth course was made up of a selection of cheeses. They were sitting under a glass dome next to us during the meal. When it was time to serve the cheese course, they took the cheeses up to their prep area and cut them into serving-size pieces for each diner’s plate.

We had an Italian Robiola di Roccaverano, a soft-ripened cheese made from a varying combination of cow, goat, and sheep’s milk. We had some Willamette Valley Perrydale, an aged, raw sheep’s milk cheese from an artisan creamery near Salem, Oregon. The third cheese we sampled was a Lou Bergier Pichin (meaning ‘the little shepherd’ in a Piedmontes dialect) which was from a small creamery near Cuneo, Italy. It is semi-soft with a rich, velvety rind and is made using dried thistle flowers instead of rennet which gives it a unique herbal, floral quality.

The cheeses were served on a plate along with a tiny Prune Poached in Armagnac, Fried Almonds, Local Raw Honey, and some Olive Oil Black Pepper House-made Cracker. Sadly, I failed to get a photo of this lovely serving. It was paired with a Chenin Blanc from Loire Valley, France.

Here is a photo of the plating of our final course – the dessert.

And here is a photo of the dessert plate as it was served to us.

Exquisite in its simplicity! It was a velvety Butterscotch Pots De Creme with local Mt. Hood Strawberries and Lemon Verbena Whipped Cream, and a Pistachio Tuille. It was paired with a 5-year Madeira from Isle of Madeira, Portugal. We watched while the Lemon Verbena Cream was whipped by hand in a bowl using a hand whisk! For 28 people!

This isn’t the first nor only time that Paul and I have eaten in a restaurant the likes of Beast. Many years ago we dined at the famed Oregon Country Inn, outside of Eugene, Oregon, where you needed to make your reservation six months in advance. All of the food they prepared and served was grown or raised right on their property. Dinner was only served to four couples at a sitting each night. It started at 8 PM and ended about 11 PM. Then in 2000, we dined at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, where we made our reservation four months ahead.

We both agree that our dinner we had at Beast was by far and away the best we’ve ever had. As Paul remarked, it was 50 times better than Charlie Trotters. We will definitely return to Beast again.

When they brought our bill, it was accompanied by two little sea salt shortbread pigs (beasts) dipped in dark chocolate.

Many, many thanks to our dear son’s and their families for this delightful Christmas gift. It was very much enjoyed and the memory of the experience will be treasured by us forever.