New Life in the Woods

Well, I finally got water to flow down from the spring box to the reservoir tank. That’s the good news. I had to replace the hose leading down to the reservoir tank with another one that I found out in the woods. There’s tons of black plastic irrigation pipe out in the woods all over the place. I think it is the remnants of someone’s old, um, “herb” gardening effort. Some is 1/2″ and some 3/4″ and the latter was the perfect size to splice onto the existing pipe just below the spring box. So, that done, the water flowed well and the reservoir started to fill up nicely. I left it overnight and checked it again the next morning and that was when I found more problems.

If you checked out my Flickr site recently, you probably saw this photo. It shows the pump inside the pump house. If you look closely you can see a big crack in the case where the pipes enter and leave the pump. I suspect that happened when water froze inside the pump during one of the last several Winters. But the problem I found the next morning was that water was leaking from the pipe where it joins to the pump, so that’s shot too. I had been hoping that the cracked case wasn’t important, that it might have happened because the pump house settled over the years to the left (as you view the picture), and the outer case might not be essential to the function of the pump. Now I think that both the pipe and the pump burst from freezing water.

So, the idea of getting the spring box functioning again might be kaput for now. Actually, there is another pump up at the main house that I might be able to use, but I think the input/output pipe diameters are different and I am not sure the other pump is powerful enough. I’ll look into that when I find time. At the very least, I’ll have to fix those pipes leading from the reservoir tank, so maybe I can install an adapter to the other pump.

This is important because I have been worrying about how to keep my garden watered and I finally planted the rest of the area I had previously prepared today. So far I have been filling up 4 gallon containers down at the stream, carrying them to the car, driving up to the garden area by the main house, carrying them to the garden from the driveway, filling up a watering can, and watering the garden by hand. I used four of these water containers to water and plant the remainder of the garden today, so it will be a big chore to keep it all watered from here on out.

In the picture, the three dark rows are the initial rows I planted last week. I used old pine needles from the forest to mulch those rows during the heat wave last week. For the new rows I found a bunch of old saw dust to use for mulch. There’s piles of it out in the woods where some big trees were cut, probably by Mark, last year. The mulch worked though! I have little pea seedlings, carrots, and lettuce peeking through the mulch already. Today I planted more of each of those plus beans, spinach, beets, onions, chives, and garlic.

I am reluctant to use the water from the main water tanks because it costs $65 to fill it up and I need that water for showers, toilet, washing dishes, and cooking. So, it would be a big help to have that spring box and pump working, especially since I want to expand the garden area a lot more. I have tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings started at the cabin, just starting to poke up through the dirt in the little pots on my kitchen counter. I’d also like to plant plant corn, potatoes, and maybe some squash. All of that will take a lot more room and a lot more watering.

Meanwhile, now that the little plants are starting to poke up above the soil, I need to get going on some fencing around the garden area to keep deer and other critters out. There’s plenty of old fence material that I dug out of the woods a couple weeks ago, but I need to contrive something for fence posts and figure out some way to anchor them. Luckily there are tons of small Fir trees that have fallen over in the woods in back of the garden area, so I just have to drag them to the garden, cut off all the branches and cut them to the needed lengths… and then figure out how to anchor them. But that won’t keep out all the pests, as you can see from the picture here. I have found giant slugs (not Banana slugs, like my college mascot from Santa Cruz, but slugs nonetheless) and snails in the woods. I may have to set out some beer traps for these but I’ll worry about that when I find them in the garden. Birds might be an issue too, but I’ll worry about that later too.

So, I’m excited about the plants coming up and my little seedlings at the cabin, but worried about the water and pests. It’s all good though. The vegetables should taste really good after all the work I’ve put into the garden!