Saturday September 14, 2013, Guerneville, CA.
It seemed like a nice day to just stay home and putter around the yard, which is what I did.
There’s always several things that one needs to get done in the fall before winter comes. I did a few of them and studied what to do to complete more of them later.
In the afternoon, I hopped on the little four wheeler machine and went up to check on the spring water system to see if it’s recovering.
The first thing I did was ride up to the top, where the main spring is and pound in a steel pole to help mark the spot where the pipe comes out of the hill. It looks easy to find right now, but as the ferns grow throughout the year, they cover it all up.
I took a big hammer with me to drive the post into the ground and was lucky I didn’t hit the spring pipe under ground, as I wasn’t paying as good of attention to that as I should of, but I did miss the pipe, by just a bit.
The white pipe is an air vent and the red post with the white top is the one I just installed.
After that, I checked just below that to see how my new spring tap was doing. It needed a little adjustment to help the water go down the pipe better.
Then I went on down the hill to the water tanks. Here I measured how much water was coming down the pipe from the main spring. It measured, just over one gallon a minute, not as good as I would like it, but that’s just what the spring puts out this time of the year.
I had another pipe from another spring that put out one quarter of a gallon a minute that I also hooked into the main water line so it goes into the tanks too, so now we have about 1 an 1 quarter of a gallon per minute going into the water tanks.
Here is a picture of the water tanks.
I checked the water level in the tanks by reading the metal ball hanging on the side of the tank, which you can see in this picture below. It’s showing the tanks are now just over half full, around 10, 000 gallons of water, so things are now improving from a few days ago, when it registered empty.
Can you see the metal ball just below the welding seam, second from the bottom on the left of the tank? The tanks are full when the ball is close to the ground.
The tanks are filling up, which is nice, so I hope that little problem has been taking care of.
Back home for a little nap and some more puttering in the yard.
I also thought I’d try making some ice cream again. The last batch I made was real good, except, somehow, I got corned from it. I think I may have accidently got the wrong half and half. I noted when I went to the store this time to buy some half and half, that one kind is sweetened with corn syrup, so I may have gotten that one by mistake.
This time, I was real careful. Making ice cream is sort of a pain as the good stuff is made by making custard first. The whole process messes up a lot of pots and pans and makes a big mess in the kitchen. I didn’t do a perfect job, but I’m learning how to do it and no matter what, it seems to be good. I hope I don’t get corned from this batch, only time will tell.
That’s it for a nice day at home.
