How do I make a live line buried in my flower bed safe?

The cleanest and safest fix is to disconnect that abandoned leg upstream at the porch or wherever it taps into the walkway lighting circuit. Underground splice kits with resin or heat-shrink are designed for inline wire repairs when a shovel hits a line, not for permanently burying live, capped dead-ends. Even with waterproof gel nuts, leaving energized copper sitting an inch under garden mulch is a massive hazard the next time someone digs there. If you don't actually need power out in that flower bed, you don't need to dig up the entire trench. Just open up the nearest walkway light or the junction box on the porch where the feed originates. You'll likely find the split right there—one cable feeding the walkway fixtures, and one heading off into the dirt. Disconnect that abandoned run, cap the leads inside the box, and label them dead. That isolates the bad wire completely so you can flip the breaker back on for your walkway lights right away. If you do want to keep power out there, you need to bring it up to code. Dig carefully around the cable to see how much slack you have, set a treated post, and sleeve the wire up through Schedule 80 PVC. Mount an exterior **weatherproof box** at least 12 inches above grade with a weather-resistant GFCI receptacle and an in-use bubble cover.

Whatever you do, don't just cap it and bury it again. If it was sitting bare in wet dirt reading 122V, you got lucky you found it with a garden tool instead of your bare hands.

The fact that bare copper was sitting in saturated soil carrying 122V without tripping your panel implies this entire outdoor branch circuit is fed from a standard thermal-magnetic breaker rather than a proper Class A ground-fault circuit interrupter. Wet dirt is a notoriously poor conductor, often drawing only a fraction of an amp—far below the instantaneous trip threshold of a typical 15-amp breaker, yet more than enought to be lethal. Once you isolate that abandoned run upstream, you relly ought to swap the breaker for a GFCI unit, becasue your existing walkway lights shouldn't be operating without 4-to-6 milliamp fault protection anyway.

Quick update — took the advice and opened up the junction box under the porch to disconnect that dead leg. Found a total rats' nest of three separate cables spliced togehter, and sure enugh, no GFCI anywhere on this circuit. If I swap the breaker at the panel for a GFCI breaker, will that protect everthing downstream, or shoud I install a weather-resistant GFCI receptacle out on the porch instead?