Of the First Water

Some of you may remember the drilling of our new well last June (If you don’t, the blog entry is here: Ceci n’est pas une pipe « The Shambles under Highland Butte).

It took a long time to get down to the water, and has been longer still waiting for the installation of the pump that brings it to the surface. At the time of the drilling, the team of guys said, yup, it was good water. They had tasted it, but neither of us had been here at the time, and once they’d taken their sip, they pulled up their equipment and went away. So we have looked at that bit of well pipe sticking out of the ground for some time now, wondering what we bought down there under the volcano.

Last week the pump man finished his job, and we now have water running from the new well. It was time for a sample of the goods.

A taste test is a formal thing. First you must catch the free run.

Imagine how far this water has come to spill from that glass! Actually, I don’t have to imagine it. I know it’s come 545 feet to the surface, and then a short run to the hydrant. But let me wax appreciative of the long years this water has lain in an aquifer beneath us. I do realize these actual drops are part of a cycle of flow and replenishment, but as a unitary thing, water underground is a long-term asset. And though it may flow copiously when we open the pipe, it deserves our respect and our special care now that we have brought it to the surface.

On with the ritual of the first taste: assess its appearance.

Looks good. Clarity is a relief.

Take a sniff…

No nose. That’s good.

Down the hatch. This is not wine, so no sipping. It takes a great good glug to know what you’re about.

And the verdict is…

Yes!

Yes, it is good. It’s interesting to set it against the water from our old well which, though it comes grudgingly from its vein down below, is water we like very much. If there were more of it, we’d have been happy to leave well enough in the well. This water is, how shall I say? It has a softer feel. Neither has much of any mineral flavor, no chemical flavor (are we not relieved?), no breath of taste that returns across your tongue when you breathe over it. All good. But they are different. It would be worse than describing the subtleties of a market wine to try to put labels on the differences. But the drillers were right, it’s good water. Sweet day!

Socks in the Wild

It was early last fall, at the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival, when my friend Rose and I were talking to each other about how good we were not to have bought all the wonderful fibers and yarns and tools around us. I was sitting in my booth spinning. My booth backed to another one, where there were some sock yarns marked down and piled up. Of course, there are always more projects than you have hands for, and I looked away several times from a skein of self-patterning colors. It was a combination that kept catching my eye…

“Oohew,” said Rose, “Yes. Wild violets in the woods.”

So I was done then. The skein was, after all, marked down. Last of lot. Uneven, unmatched, one only. Wild violets.

“You were meant to have it,” said Rose.

It’s been all fall and winter, and there have been no wild violets in the woods. But this morning as I went out to feed, there they were, bunched together by the path. Wild violets.

Well, you can see I haven’t finished the socks yet. But maybe before the violets are finished, they will be, too.

Construction Report: It Runs Downhill

At least, I thought it did, but now I am corrected.

Our new septic field is under construction. This thing looks big enough to me to accommodate a family of 24. Surely we two are not expected to use all this!

Is there going to be test?

In any case, it’s been instructional. I have learned that, except for when it leaves the house and heads for the tank,

it, this effluvium of ours, does not run downhill. It runs dead level. The contractors have been out there with laser levels making sure the line is level within one inch from its start to the end. “What?” I said. “How can this be?”

Here is the pipe that snakes through the septic field:

Believe me, it’s level. In this view, the connections between sections aren’t closed yet, and after our recent snow, the excavators found the snow had shoved the line around here and there. They were out there with their lasers again, putting it back. (At least… there is the possibility they were shooting down satellites with their rotating laser level, but if so, they missed. Nothing landed.) Here is one in the field (not our field: this is a photo by Bill Bradley (billbeee 02:38, 29 April 2007), generously made available on Wikipedia.)

You can see a staff lying at an angle against the pile of dirt. That staff carries graduated markings, and a movable sensor that is capable of detecting the laser. When the beam crosses the sensor, the sensor gives a signal [beep!].

It’s amusing in an arch sort of way to note the use of shovels next to this 21st Century piece of equipment. Plumb and level are some of the most basic measurements, and should be at home with a shovel: a plumb bob runs on gravity and a spirit level works because a bubble floats on liquid. (Want to know more? Bob is called plumb because he is made of lead: Latin plumbum. The spirit level, invented around 1660 by Melchisedech Thevenot, is called that because ethanol, a distilled spirit, was used as the liquid inside the curved tube in which the bubble floats; ethanol because its freezing point is lower than that of water.)

In any event this is a closer view of the well-leveled pipe:

And now, closer:

Those little louver looking things are openings, whole lots of them. Apparently, instead of the contents of the pipe flowing gracefully downhill, it seeps out all along the way. If I am to assess the amount of seepage through that pipe early on in the progress, I would guess very little of our output will ever see the far end of it. It’s a looooooong way from the house.

I’m a little worried about the test. What happens if we’re not up to it?

And the Wages of Snow Is…

…Mud.

Click it if you want a little wider view.

There is nothing pretty about it in this condition: ankle-deep and sucking you right out of your boots if you stay too long:

By the time I had leaned over and pointed the camera at my feet, I was doomed. Sorry for not stopping to make a photo of the stocking foot that landed outside the boot.

As long as we are on the subject of the unattractive side of country life, let me share one of the inevitable tasks that come to those who keep animals. I think it was about this time last year that I did not make this post, thinking my readers’ senses of delicacy might be offended, and that it might put them off the idea of what fun this small farm life is. In the meantime I have decided in favor of real life. If you are toying with the idea of taking up small-scale farming (or any scale animal farming), you need to know this. If you are only a romantic soul along for the entertainment, well, you are as likely to be entertained by this as by any of it. So here you are:

When you have

animals

and feed, you get

poop.

And the inconvenient truth about animals is, they are not too particular about where they leave their byproducts. If they spend their nights in a shed, they will mess it up, and over time, the mess will need removing. It would be nice to have something that worked like a dump-truck: just tip the whole building up and empty it out. But I haven’t seen an animal barn made that way. The only true answer on our place involves a fork and all the muscles in legs, back and shoulders. Yesterday was forking day in the sheep shed. We will have lambs coming soon, and the shed needs to be clean for their arrival. It really needs to be clean all the time, for their wholesome living, but some tasks do get put off until they just need to be done. The shed gets forked out a few times a year, once in the cold season and more in the sweaty one. In the winter, the accumulated hay and manure warms the shed — the making of compost generates heat. In the height of summer, the shed lets you know when it wants cleaning.

Aside from the unspeakable pleasure of hot water falling on tired muscles the evening after forking out, we have this other boon of the event:

It might not look like much, this pile of worn-out old hay. But by next year, this will be the best, blackest compost you can imagine. Poop and old grass make a pretty good combination of ingredients. The compost-maker’s recipe calls for “brown” stuff and “green” stuff together. In this case, the hay is the brown and the poop is the green, and it will all go to work in the vegetable garden and turn into carrots and lettuce and summer squashes. Not just now, but later. That’s the up-side of dealing with what comes out of animals. In a way, you get to eat them twice.