Fertilizer Injector and More Work On the Spring Water Line Crossings

Wednesday November 4, 2020 Guerneville CA.

Fertilizer injector installation

One of the things I purchased shopping yesterday was a fertilizer injector that would fix on my hoses so I can inject fertilizer when I water.

I wanted to get some fertilizer on my blueberry bushes as they need some help getting some new growth going.

The unit just screwed on to my automatic watering timer and I filled it up with stuff and turned on the timer. It seemed to work ok and did the job. I’ll be installing something like this on most of my watering timers as most of my yard could use some fertilizer to get stuff growing faster.

I thought this way of fertilizing the yard would be the easiest way and apply the stuff more uniformly. I’ll be experimenting with this method as I go. So far it looks good.

I sat around the yard for a bit while testing out the new unit and then hopped on the quad runner and rode on up into the hills to work on another spring water pipe crossing, the last one.

Spring water pipe crossing work

I pulled up to the pipe that holds up the water pipe and stood on the machine to lower the pipe down so I could work on it.

Then I went down below and removed the water pipe from this tee so I could put it through the steel underground crossing pipe.

I planned to move the tee to another spot so I spliced the pipe with a nipple and a couple of clamps.

Then it was back up to the crossing where I fed the plastic water pipe through the steel underground crossing pipe.

The entrance to the steel pipe is under the rocks which I put there to keep the dirt from plugging up the pipe. A couple plastic feed bags over it might help too and I have lots of those.

Here’s the spring’s plastic pipe on the trail I made for it to get down to the crossing. I will eventually cover the pipe with dirt this winter.

Once I had the pipe through the crossing I installed the tee in the new place in the main water line so now water is flowing to the water tanks from the springs up the hill.

Trail work

Once that was hooked back up and I had a nice sit in the forest for awhile, I decided to have a look at what needs to be done on the trail up above this crossing. The pipe goes up through here so I checked it out and did some work.

I will eventually bury the pipe to keep it from burning up in a forest fire and the rodents eating holes in the pipe.

I checked the pipeline further up and cleared out this stuff that was in the way and did a bit of trail work here too.

I worked on that until I couldn’t work anymore and sat down for a break as it was rather nice in the forest today.

Our water tanks

On the way home I stopped to check out the water level in our water tanks. They were about a third full of water and slowly gaining each day.

Fortunate to have stainless steel water tanks

We are fortunate to have three stainless steel water tanks as very few people have even one as they are quite expensive.

My brother Tom used to build them for wine for a living and was able to make these for us for a very reasonable price. Between the tanks and the 2 inch main line to the houses I think we have almost 20 thousand gallons of water. Right now there are 5 houses and my brother Tom’s farmers market gardens using the water.

Somehow I’ve defaulted to the water maintenance man and do most of the upkeep work. My plan is to bury most of the plastic water lines this winter.

Nice day.