Monday August 29, 2023 Guerneville CA.
Spring work
I went up to a neighbor’s place to help them tap a spring. With my sore back, the plan was to just bark out orders to make sure they did it the right way, my way. :O) Their house got burned down a few years ago in the big forest fire. They are just now getting ready to build their new house. We used to go by this place when we were teens on our scooters to rob the oranges from the old orange tree there. No one lived there at the time.
I parked here, just below the spring we were gong to work on.
Getting the job done
As per my instructions, they’d already gathered the rocks we’d need and I helped them find the blue clay we’d need, so we were ready to get the job done.
The first thing we needed to do was set the slope on the outlet pipe which collects the spring water. I set it to make sure it was right.
The old spring is under here. They originally used an old method that I’ve improved on over the years and is much easier to do with much less work and a lower cost, about thirty bucks for the pipes and stuff.
Big slugs
We’d pulled out about 23 big slugs a week ago and today they pulled out these ones and set them free in another spot.
The guys son, Julian did most of the harder work with the Dad helping out hauling the clay and the rocks to him.
Here’s the clayed in spring tap ready to collect the water. We put a stainless steel kitchen strainer upside down on top of the gutter down spout screen and pushed it into the blue clay.
After that we piled rocks on top of that, then put some heavy plastic sheeting over that with dirt on top of that to seal it up and keep the critters out of it.
They are just finishing up putting the rocks in over the top in this photo.
The last thing they did was put the plastic sheet and put some dirt over that to seal it up. They will need about six inches of the dirt, which they will finish up later. That was about two hours of work for them.
Game cam pictures
Earlier in the day, before going up to work on the spring, I rode the dirt bike up into the forest to collect the game cam cards.
There’s a little yellow bird getting a drink of water in this one.
I’m pretty sure that’s a fox running by in this one.
And that sure looks like a bobcat walking by, heading down the hill.
And a wild pigeon came by for a drink.
Nice day.
