Flag every sprinkler head before yard work: a 20-minute how-to

The cheapest insurance in all of lawn care is a $10 bag of marking flags. Any time a machine with tines or blades is about to cross your lawn—a rented aerator, a dethatcher, anyone's equipment including ours—twenty minutes of flagging beforehand protects hundreds of dollars of irrigation hiding just below the surface. Here's the method that finds every head.

Run each irrigation zone, one at a time

Don't try to remember where the heads are—run the system and let it show you. At the controller, start zone one manually and walk the area it covers. Every head that pops up gets a flag. Pay special attention to the tired ones that barely rise above the grass: those are precisely the heads a tine finds, because they sit at exactly the wrong height.

Use a flag pattern that works

Plant each flag beside the head, not on top of it—a flag stabbed into the head's riser marks the spot and blocks your view of it at the same time. Count the heads as you flag each zone and jot the number down. A typical Villages irrigation system runs four to eight zones, and having "zone 3 = 6 heads" on a scrap of paper means you'll notice if you only found five.

Don't forget the non-sprinkler hazards

While you're walking with flags in hand, mark the rest of the below-and-at-grade obstacles too:

• Irrigation valve boxes (the green lids fade into the turf)
• Drip line runs at the edges of planting beds
• Cable and utility markers
• Shallow tree roots and exposed root flares
• Downspout extensions and drain emitters

What a hit head looks like

The lucky version announces itself: a geyser the next time that zone runs. The unlucky version is silent—a cracked fitting below grade that shows up two weeks later as a soggy patch and a water bill that crept up. That's why the twenty minutes of flagging beats any amount of fixing.

How we handle it

Flagging is part of our standard process on every aeration we do—we run the zones, flag the heads, and steer around them, because it's our responsibility not to hit them. If you'd rather the entire job, flags included, were someone else's careful hands, that's exactly what the instant quote covers.