water pipe

This and that

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I seem to still be in recovery mode today, even after taking yesterday as a day of rest. I tend to forget just how draining it can be after spending time with my mother, even when she’s having one of her better days!

It’s also working out to be a hotter day. We’ve got a high of 26C/79F for today and tomorrow and, depending on what app I’m looking at, we’ll be hitting either 29C/84 or 31C/88F by the end of the week.

I did get at least one thing accomplished – finally! I cut away the web of roots and got the water pipe out from where I’d tried patching it, to the tap.

It took more digging and cutting to find the bottom of the tap and cut it free!

The only thing holding it upright was the web of roots, and that length of conduit pipe.

The short sections of rigid pipe were filled with dirt and roots. A couple of them had to be blasted with water before I could get them off the water pipe.

I did find where water can been coming out, when I did the patches and tested the tap. Quite a split in the pipe!

How the ground pipe was joined to the tap pipe was not what I expected. I thought there might be some sort of threaded connector. The metal pipe is jammed into the water pipe – and it is still very water tight, and very secure! I’ll probably have to cut it off, if I bother to at all.

I would like to use the original tap again. Even parts of the original metal pipe, too, if I can. However, my intended replacement for all this is to use an ordinary, heavy duty garden hose that can be easily removed, as needed. The dirt and roots in the short sections of pipe reinforce my plan to have a long pipe, from house to tap, to protect the hose.

For now, however, I will not remove the rest of the pipe, to the house. There are going to be much larger roots to cut through, plus it runs through a higher traffic area that gets regularly mowed, so I don’t want to dig a trench until I’m ready to put in the new system. I’m very interested in seeing how that hose end that comes out of the ground is attached to the water pipe!

So, for this project I need to get a long enough heavy duty hose, enough pipe, with drainage holes, to fit together and reach from house to tap, angled fittings for the ends that will get a removeable seal around the hose to prevent water, dirt or critters from getting in, and appropriate pipes and fittings to attach the hose to the tap assembly. For the tap itself, I want to build a box for the vertical pipe with the tap mounted on the garden side. I liked the original post’s little roof over the tap and will probably expand on that, to double as a shelf or something. The box will have a door at the back to access the hose and pipes, with room enough to store a few things, like the cord that will be used to pull the hose through the underground pipes, should it ever need to be removed, repaired or replaced.

Once this is installed and complete, I plan to make a vegetable washing station under the tap, using salvaged materials I’ve found around the property.

Hopefully, by the time it’s done, it’ll be good enough to last another 50 years or so.

After I finished up with the tap and hose set up, I headed towards the house and checked out the old kitchen garden. I was finally able to get a photo of one of the developing luffa.

I’ve been able to spot three of these. Hopefully, they have been pollinated and will develop into mature luffa gourds before we get frost. These are so high up, there’s no possibility of hand pollinating!

Before heading back to the house, I had an adorable surprise.

Tiny, familiar kittens.

Octomom had brought them to the house!

I only saw 4 of them, including this one.

They still can’t move very fast, so I was able to catch this one and hold it for a little while. This one is completely black. I saw the other black one, and it appears to have a white patch on its chest. I also saw the brown and the grey tabbies. Where the other 4 are, I could not see. Eventually, Octomom came around for them, but only two followed her across the yard. The rest were still hiding under the storage house.

While I was outside, I started to get some messages from the Cat Lady. She was at the vet with the kittens, and the prognosis is not good. They would have died within the week, she was told. As it is, they have a cat virus (calci), herpes, low glucose, low oxygen, pneumonia, infected ears and sores in their throats. The kittens have been at the vet all day, and the bill is getting high. I feel so bad about this. We were only going to pass on the one kitten, so now it’s double the expense for her, and we have no way to help out.

Priority is going to be spaying and neutering, because a lot of this is exacerbated by the sheer number of kittens.

Oh, wow!! Something just happened while I was writing this!

Two Toes is letting Tin Whistle nurse!

I had been expecting the kittens to at least try to nurse on her, since Decimus leaves the room once she’s done with nursing, and batting them away when they want to nurse more. They had not been trying, though, nor did Two Toes, until just moments ago!

Two Toes is doing really well. She seems quite happy, loves head pets, and gave me kisses today!

Whatever fight she was in that left her with a broken leg, the fur on her face and head is full of scabs that are healing well.

The only down side is poor Snarly Marlee! She does NOT like the kittens. The girls try to bring her into the living room for a while, so she can get a break, while they are there.

Hopefully, it won’t be for much longer. It would be fantastic if we could adopt them all out!

The Re-Farmer

Some progress outside

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I didn’t get back to the trench with anything to cut the roots, yet. I wanted to wash away as much of the soil as I could. First, to uncover the roots to better see them, but also to get a better look at the pipe itself.

I just don’t know what to make of this!

There are sections of the wider pipe, all along the main pipe (I agree with 53old; it looks like irrigation pipe). Once I get the roots cut away, I will take off one of the couplings I put on in my attempt to repair the pipe, and I should be able to take this length of the pipe out, all the way to the tap. Then I’ll be able to take a good look at what is under those wider sections of pipe.

The only thing is, I have yet to find the end of the pipe. I’ve been digging around at the bottom of the tap but keep hitting roots and rocks, and that end of the pipe is quite a bit lower than the rest of it. My brother will be here tomorrow morning, and I hope he’ll have time to see this!

I also managed to get the bed the garlic was harvested from almost completely ready for planting.

The first photo in the series is the “before” picture.

After clearing away the grass clipping mulch, you can see that there is a fair bit of weeding to do, mostly along the edge. That crab grass comes up from under the log border. I broke up the entire bed to weed it, and was finding plenty of rhizomes making their way into the middle! Then I added a bag of manure to work into the soil.

Because the edges are where the most trouble is for weeds, once the manure was worked in, I raked the soil away from the log edges and into the middle. Then I took some of the grass clipping mulch and packed a thick layer tight against the logs. They won’t be enough to choke out the weeds, but they will at least make it harder for them to get through. Plus, it’ll make sure we don’t accidentally plant too close to the edge.

Last of all, I raked the soil back towards the grass clippings and leveled it off a bit. There are a lot of hard clumps, though, so I’ll have to come back to it with the cultivator tool and break those up. Once that is done, it’ll be ready for planting.

What we’ll most likely do is plant in three blocks, square food gardening style, with the beets in the middle. The radishes are a fast crop, so having them near an end makes sense. The spinach is a cut and come again crop, so having them near and end also makes sense. While the beet greens can be eaten, we’ve don’t tend to eat them a lot, their roots will take the longest to reach a harvestable size. We will likely harvest them all at once at the end of the year, so they can stay in the harder to reach middle zone.

Once these beds get converted to high raised beds, reach won’t be as much of a problem. The lower the bed, the harder it is to reach the middle of it. If you’re short like me and thinking of growing in low raised beds, I would recommend not going more than 3 feet wide for that reason. Ours are 4 feet wide, which is great for a high bed, but gets pretty painful on a low one! Even the box beds, two of which are about a foot high, it’s still uncomfortable to reach into the middle and actually do anything of substance.

That’s where we’re at now! Once the bed prep is finished, we just have to choose which varieties we will be planting. 😊

The Re-Farmer