A Nice Glass of Well Water, Anyone?

It's really practical having a well.  This is Canada after all, land o' plenty when it comes to water resources.

I admit that I used to be pretty lax when it came to water usage.  Having spent the first few years here on well water, our motto was "let the water run".  The more we used it, the better it got.  It's full of iron, sulfur and black sediment.

Can I pour you a glass?

I don't think I need to tell you the glass on the left is "city" water, which we have in the house.  The lovely, appetizing glass on the right is from the well, which we still use to water the plants outside, and wash the cars.  That we used to cook, drink, shower and do laundry with this water amazes me to this day.  The quality of the water then was infinitely clearer, because we ran the well more, but today, as I took the kitty litter boxes outside for a good scrub (just the sort of thing I use well water for...), I was astounded by the quality, or lack thereof.

From time to time, our well water would just run black.  It happened in the shower, it happened while doing laundry, it happened while putting on water to cook pasta.  We're pretty sure it was just sediment from the holding tank, but nonetheless, it was disconcerting.  I'm also aware that what you can't see, E. coli, for instance, is a distinct possibility, considering we're surrounded by dairy farms.  We're also surrounded by lots of houses with non-conforming septic tanks, but  let's not even go there.   The previous owner was a biologist, and tested the water in his lab on a regular basis.  It always came up potable, but still - so did the water in Walkerton up until the tragedy - as Wikipedia so aptly puts it.

The day we finally were hooked up to city water was bittersweet.  It was like having an umbilical cord re-attached, a regression of sorts.  We could no longer deny the fact the city was encroaching and we're standing there with open arms, welcoming it.  Hypocrites!

I remember a bright, sunny day.  I can still picture the backhoe in the street, digging down, down, down, to reach the water main.  I also remember Eric plumbing the pipe out to the street.  It works like this here:  the city contractor digs down to the water main and installs a valve.  We're responsible for piping from the house to the valve.  Eric was in the crawl space, I was outside, and we spent a lot of time that day, shouting to each other through the thick wall of the foundation.  We needed to dig under the foundation, and at some point, Eric was excavating with a shovel outside (this pre-dates our John Deere TLB, which I am sure Eric was dreaming of at this precise moment), and suddenly, a few feet down, he hit what sounded like metal.  It was like the ghost of the house (and there is one - a good one) had guided Eric's shovel to an old cast-iron drain pipe that went along the house and under the foundation to the ditch.  It had sheared at the exit of the foundation, probably with years of frost heave.  It served perfectly to thread the water pipe through, once it was cleared from decades of mud and debris.   We've had a few moments of divine intervention, specifically, Madame Ménard intervention, but this was one of those moments where you raise your face to the skies, put on an ear-to-ear grin, and give praise to the powers that are.  Merci, Madame Ménard.

There are some things you dread, and the excavation was one of those things.  But within a few hours, we had real, clear, sodium hypochlorite-infused water.  Gone are the days of treating laundry with Rust-out.  The days of scrubbing rust stains out of the toilet and sink - adios!   The days of clearing blocked faucets with CLR - buh-bye!  The days of ironing Eric's white uniform shirts, and finding a huge yellow stain on the last panel - auf wiedersehen!

That evening, Eric and I stood beside the toilet and flushed, and flushed, and flushed, marveling at the clarity of the water.  We gingerly took apart and cleaned all of our taps with CLR and a toothbrush, ensuring that hard water and iron stains were a thing of the past.  We flushed out the hot water tank, adding years to its life.  It was a day to remember.

And on a day like today, when I use our well water outside, I'm taken back in time...

...and I'm so grateful we don't have to drink it anymore!

We've obviously changed our water habits.  We don't let water run needlessly, we have a low-flush toilet, and only run full loads of laundry and dishes.  Overall, we're cognizant of our consumption.  And grateful, too - very grateful -  for the clear gold that runs from our taps.

The Firepit

Part of cleaning up a old farm property involves strategically placed burn piles.  (I say "strategic" with the most facetious air possible).  They are blights on the landscape, however, in most cases they are necessary evils when trying to clean up over-run grounds.  I would give my right arm to own a branch chipper.  Well, put like that, I might lose my right arm if I owned a branch chipper, so maybe we're better of with burn piles than machinery.

Invariably, excuses for not burning the piles stack up like the branches and twigs that fill them:  it's either too hot, or too cold, too windy, or blowing in the wrong direction, too dry to burn safely, or too wet to bother.  Creative Procrastination 101 rules here.

We've got three burn piles, and one of them was so overgrown, there were Manitoba maples growing around the edges that were starting to get a bit out of hand.  We took it to task this spring, and although we still have to scrape the remnants of the pile together with the backhoe, it's not out of control any more.  We should be able to completely eradicate it with a bit of effort by the end of the summer.  I'll breathe a sigh of relief when I see grass growing on this spot instead of weeds.

Believe me when I say nothing good can become of a pile of old bricks, a crisp, starry night and good intentions, all underwritten by wine:

That's how we came to create this lovely fire pit, unfortunately situated right when you turn into our driveway.  We strive to make good first impressions!    Driven partly by practicality, the fire pit was close enough to the house so we could keep an eye on it, yet far enough away from outbuildings to pose a fire-risk.  We always had the hose nearby, and burned only when conditions were right, which was never too often.

We had some old red bricks piled up against the wood shed, and we'd never use them to make a path, for instance, but they served admirably as the border for the fire pit.  With time, weeds encroached, and our fire pit became a blight.  The other day, I'd had enough.  It was time to bring in the front loader:

Surprisingly, I ended up with a front-loader full of bricks that Eric could dump at the municipal dump the next morning.  When Eric called me at work to tell me they no longer accept bricks, I wanted to wig-out, big-time.  The thought of having to off-load this pile of !@#$ onto a skid for tidy storage makes me cringe.  I want to get rid of this junk, not store it!  I wish our conscience could let us bury them somewhere on the far reaches of the property, but we can't do that.  So many injustices have been done to these grounds over the decades, that something like burying waste material would keep us tossing and turning at night.  We've removed tons and tons of buried concrete already, so we don't want to add to the misery.

 

Because we've burned a lot of old, unpainted wood in this pile, it's full of metal hinges, screws, and Eric's nemesis: the nail.  With tractor tires costing the equivalent of a mortgage payment, we like to take the extra time and pick out any nails.  An ounce of prevention, (or gram, in our case)...is worth a pound, (or kilo), of cure.   (One of those is a better deal, but I'll let you figure it out for yourself).

Using an old mesh screen, I started to sift the well-rotted ashes into the wheelbarrow.  Next concern was where to actually dump said wheelbarrow.  We've decided to spread it onto a small, newly plowed field on the south side of our barn.  I was hoping Eric would return with an empty front-loader, of course, because screening the ashes would be so much easier directly into the front loader, as opposed to the wheelbarrow, but that didn't pan out like we planned, did it now?

So, we've put our feelers out for someone, anyone, who'd like to come pick-up a these lovely, lovely red bricks and find a permanent vocation for them.

And the next time someone accuses us of being a few bricks short of a full load, I can prove them otherwise.

The Culvert

The Culvert - it sounds somewhat like the title to a horror movie, however, it was just another chapter in our life at Muddy Acres. The old culvert over which we need to drive to gain entrance to our property was a bit under-sized, considering the farm equipment that needs to gain access to our fields. We had been meaning to up-grade this detail for quite some time, and this September we had our opportunity.

















First we needed to remove the old drain pipe. This task proved quite easy, given Eric's ability with the back-hoe. I was the unlucky soul who got to stand knee-deep in the mud. We were left with an open ditch, not quite a comforting thought, since we had no access to our driveway and needed to park our cars at our neighbour's place.

This is what things looked like at the end of the first day:

















Thankfully, the sun was shining just like the forecast said it would, and we were able to place in the new, larger drain pipe. At some point, Eric was digging, asking me, "How much deeper do I have to go?", at which point I got very worried, mainly because I had no clue! I thought he had this figured out! Our measuring method wasn't very sophisticated, but it worked. We just took a long piece of wood and marked it with our desired depth, and yours truly, donning her best pair of rubber boots (a country girl can't own too many pairs of rubber boots!) waded into the muck and gauged the depth. ("Yes, dear, the mud is wallowing in over the top of my boots. I think you can stop digging now!")

We were precise, too, because when the new pipe was lowered in, we had a good fit with nice drainage.






















We lined the base with some geo-textile membrane, probably over-kill, but we had some left over from our patio-building exploits, and lowered the pipe into the ground using chains and the back-hoe. We had 2 sections of pipe, since we couldn't get one the full length, so we had to make a join using a huge gasket specially made for the pipe. The gasket is made of hard plastic and joins at the top with 2 huge ties. It is ridged and lines up with 2 sections of ridges on either side of each piece, and it was a bit of a challenge to line everything up properly, but we managed without too many obsceneties. I had my doubts about the solidity of the gasket, but it was a seamless join and everything fitted together perfectly. Once the join was made, Eric was able to back-fill with the earth he excavated, and the ending of yet another project was celebrated. (And once again, when people asked how we spent the weekend, we just look at each other and grin: you had to be there to understand).