To me, irrigation systems are like SUVs, fairly useless requisites of conspicuous consumerism that actually damage our ecosystem. It has struck me that everyone I know riding around in a big empty cargo truck also owns an irrigation system.
 
Most of my garden consultations eventually come round to a discussion about watering. I take no pleasure in the hours I must spend explaining to folks that their irrigation system is not meeting their needs. People don’t love to hear that they wasted wads of cash and they still have to lift a finger. No, it can’t hit the roses. Yes, it is constant moisture that is causing the rot on the maple tree. No, you can’t run it for fifteen minutes every morning; all of your roots will surface. No, I don’t know why the representative told you that. What? You say if you knew that you should run it all day every three weeks you wouldn’t have spent $10,000.00 on it? Maybe you should have talked to me sooner.
 
After one particularly appalling year spent babysitting a client’s sprinklers I decided to bring some hoses and regular sprinklers over and try to save what was left of the garden before the big wedding that was to take place there in September. We couldn’t get the company that installed the damn thing to turn it on until June. Which was okay because the massive roots that were cut to install it weakened the structural integrity of the old hickory trees in the garden so two of them crashed down in a spring storm. The clean-up took until June. Then, the system was set to run for a half hour every day. When I showed the client (with a can) that any given spot was only getting 1/32  of an inch, she freaked out and insisted that the complicated timer system be reset. It was reset in July, but a rain sensor was picking up moisture from a neighbor’s system and prevented hers from kicking in. The sensor was removed in August and I set about replacing the many trees, shrubs and perennials that had died while my client was tearing at her hair and developing a martini problem over her sprinkler drama.
 
Mr. Client, whom I tried mightily to avoid, took every opportunity to glare at me and remind me how much he had spent on this pile of plastic tubing. So here I was, in August, lugging my Grandpa’s trusty Rain Kings and a mile of hose to the McMansion. The wedding was six weeks away. I walked around the perimeter of the house, looking for spigots. There freaking weren’t any. Not one. I used the code to open the garage door and found a single spigot, attached to the wall, near the door. I hooked up a hose, snaked it out and around the corner. Hooked up another hundred feet and got as far as the ground level deck. One more and I made it just to the perimeter of the garden. I turned on the water and ran back to see the tiny trickle that was gurgling from the old sprinkler’s emitters as they coughed and spun, then died. Back in the garage however, there was a river coursing from the spigot, across the tea-stained custom floor. I felt the wind of the SUV before the grill blotted out the sun. Mr. Client snorted and demanded to know what the hell was going on. When I explained that there were no spigots outside, he looked at me like I was simple and yelled “No s***! That’s why I have a $10,000.00 sprinkler system!”