Checking Out and Repairing an Old Spring Up in the Hills

Friday April 24, 2020 Guerneville CA.

Water spring work in the forest

I continued to put the sprinklers on the weeds around the yard. The weeds are growing nicely and there’s enough now so the chickens don’t tear them out of the ground and kill them.

Water spring repairs

I had a water spring up in the hills I wanted to dig up and check out so put the tools on the quad runner and rode up into the hills through here headed to the spring.

I rode through here too. Lots of ferns and green stuff on the way.

Pig Wallow Spring

I made it to pig wallow spring and parked and got to work.

The wallow

I try to discourage the hogs from using the wallow as they tend to tear my black spring pipe out occasionally. The white pipe is my spring tap that collects the water out of the mountain so I can direct it to our water tanks for usage.

The spring tap is above the white collector pipe so I dug it out with the trawl to get to the stainless box that covers the drain pipe..

Lots of little roots

I took the rocks out I had in there and discovered a lot of little roots but the spring was still working and wasn’t plugged up. There was also quite a bit of mud in there that has accumulated over the years. I think I installed this spring tap about 30 years ago and it’s been working all that time with no maintenance until now. The only reason I decided to dig this up is the spring water was cycling which make me curious why but it was still working just fine and didn’t really need dug up.

Lots of roots in there and I’m just getting to the stainless steel filter box that covers the outlet pipe.

Cleaned up and resealed with blue clay

I cleaned it all out and put some new blue clay in the base then used clay to seal up the front so there was now no hole exposed in the hillside which looks like this all clayed in.

I wasn’t expecting to get that spring all put back together today but I kept at it puttering and it got done.

Repaired this spring pipe too

On the way down the hill I stopped at another spring and noticed quite a lot of water coming out of the hill so I dug up around the pipe tee and found the pipe had pulled off for the last year or so. I pushed the black pipe back on the tee so now that water will also go in our water tanks.

I rode on down the hill headed for home going through here.

Ordered up a new chicken incubator

Last night I decided to order a chicken incubator online so I checked out a lot of them and zeroed in on one for about a 150 bucks. It holds 56 chicken eggs and does an automatic turning of all the eggs every two hours and has automatic temp and humidity controls. I got it ordered and it should be here in about a week.

Old incubator

The other incubator I was given was old and worn out. It also would only do about ten eggs and didn’t have an automatic egg turner and was a pain to open it up and close it all the time. I think I can use the heating unit to help heat the newly born chicks.

Little peep pen construction

So if I hatch out about forty chicks I need something to keep them together so I found some plastic three foot high fence I had and cut it in half so I could make a small pen the little peeps can’t get  out.
They can go through an inch hole when they are first born.

I used some hog clips to fasten the two halves together and it looks like this. I’ll fasten part of it to the wall in the feed room to help hold it up.

I sat around chair hopping in the evening as it was a nice sunny warm day out and I had a nice time working up in the quiet forest getting stuff done.