I had been talking about the well/irrigation for a few weeks now, and it is finally (mostly) done!
To recap: we have a well that was sunk by the Dept of Ag (or one of those types) several years ago under the previous owner. It is a deep (for here) well that was a test but has never been utilized as far as I know. It is in a great position for us to water the orchard, coop, garden, greenhouse, etc, BUT it was just a pipe in the ground. We had to see if it could refill quickly enough and had enough water to use.
TWS rented a pump to time how many gallons per min we could get out of the well and how quickly the well pipe refilled from the aquifer. The well is 100+ feet down. Found out that it could bear the load admirably, so we started building our irrigation system.
TWS laid down the concrete pad for the well and surprised me by putting our initials in it <3
This is was a family affair to get the well pump and 100 feet of pvc pipe down the well.
We had to put the well pipe down in 10 ft sections. Each section needed to be primed and glued on both ends. The process was: prime everything (as demonstrated by Precious below). Glue a 10 ft section of pipe, carefully avoiding stepping in the surrounding poison ivy, onto the section that was already in the well (thank the LORD we did not drop any down the well!), then wait for that to dry. Drop the new section almost all the way down the well, glue the next piece on top of that, wait for that to dry, etc, etc
This process involved a lot of waiting on dry time.
A LOT of waiting on dry time.
Yay!!! The well head! Almost done with this part!
Then came digging the trenches 3 ft down to the barn, garden, the greenhouse site, coop site, beside the strawberry/asparagus bed, and by the shed site.
Digging....
(You can see the water in the trench....we got a ton of rain and we might have hit a spring...there was a lot of seepage. We ended up buying a pump to move massive quantities of water out of the trench as we worked. The trench would fill back up in probably an hour or two.)
Digging.....
Digging.....
Digging.....
Digging.....
Ooo! This is new! Water pipe!! After all the digging and pumping, we laid water pipes in all the trenches. This one will T off to the right to go to the orchard.
We also installed frost proof spigots. They go down three feet into the trench. TWS secured them to boards to hold them upright, then he threaded left over cheap buckets that the trees came in on the bottom. When the faucet was placed in the trench, we filled the buckets with rocks and yard cloth to keep the heavy clay from preventing draining at the bottom of the faucet when we drained the lines for winter. The buckets (and the wood you see) also helped hold the faucets in place when we backfilled around them (by hand).
Here is a closer view of the faucet, the bucket, and the braces.
By this time of the project, TWS and I were bone weary. The clay was wet and impossibly heavy and thick. We had to backfill around all 6 (or was it 7?) faucets because the tractor bucket could not get in close enough to the faucet pipe.
Here is a photo of the well house with the tanks installed. The well that you saw us dropping pipe into is on the far right of the house.
And then the mercy of the Lord....water from the ground! We will be able to water our chickens, gardens, orchards. The Lord is helping us establish our farm by carefully and deliberately putting that pocket of water below the ground, tucking it away in the rock and soil. He arranged for a huge test well to be placed there for us to use. He is altogether kind.
I was thinking, as we were testing the pipes and faucets, how incredible the blessing is of fresh water from the dirt. It reminds me of nursing a baby--bringing food from what was once a dry bosom to nourish a living human. It is also like redeeming the lost--laying down the Word in the innermost part of man, then the Living Water can flow through them, heal them, bring new growth to them and those around them. What a miraculous thing...water from the ground.
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