Lazy watering options (which involve actually watering lol)

[Oogyboogawa (John Warren)]

So, obviously the laziest watering option is not watering at all, and I have generally skewed in that direction simply out of lazin- err… efficiency.

But this week, I tracked down what I believe to be the source of a spring on our property - I was pretty sure it had been there, but hadn’t technically located the source of it. (There seems to be multiple places where it is coming out, but I believe I have located the one which is highest up the slope…)

I haven’t done anything with it yet other than dig a little bit with my bare hands (gets pretty hard though with so many rocks!) to see if I could open it up at all.

When I was younger, I am pretty sure this spring used to provide a flow of water throughout the year. Now, it seems to only produce water visibly above the surface during the wetter times of year. I am hoping it has just been buried under ~30 years (and who knows how much before I came along!) of forest leaf fall and maybe erosion from the hillside down onto it and that if we are able to dig down and uncover it we will be able to get a consistent flow through the year…

If so, this is a blessing that I don’t want to let go to waste and I have been refreshing my memory on everything I can find regarding tapping into wells, building ram pumps, etc…

If I can get all of that going with a ram pump, then we should have a constant source of enough water for our animals and quite a few if not all crops without having to pay for the water or electricity.

I know a lot of the discussion here is about raising crops that don’t need any of that in the first place, but if I have it, I figure I might as well make use of it for at least parts of our property and see how things go.

But keeping with the spirit of things, I would prefer to do it as “lazily” as possible and not have to worry about turning valves on and off to different sections at different times or whatever else - and ideally no timers that require setting up an electricity source… (Though I am not necessarily opposed to creative use of float valves, check valves, etc… I mean I am planning to base this all around a ram pump after all which is basically two glorified check valves in the right configuration).

Anyway, I was curious to hear ideas - either for my situation or things you’ve done in your own situation - to allow for the distribution of that water without causing overwatering issues since the water source in my use case is 24/7.

It might be the case that, by the time that water is spread out over a large enough area, I don’t really even need to worry about overwatering… I’m not really sure… I do have a tendency to overthink things at times. But that has also kept me out of trouble quite often, so I wanted to see if you guys have any creative thoughts/ideas/experiences.

And I’m also very much interested in hearing about experiences you’ve had which are kind of on this general topic of lazy watering but might have been a different scenario altogether.

(Lol, before starting this topic, I tried searching for “spring” but that wasn’t remotely helpful, and searching for “pump” returned a bunch of squash… )

[Hugo (Hugo Morvan)]

Great to have a water source. I would open them up as much as i could and monitor year round what they do. Think of a plan what to do in the meantime when you have one which is all year round.
Opening them up increases flowrates, increases wash-out, increases flowrate etc. So you do not yet know what you have unless you harvest it for quite a while and monitor.
I’d say logic dictates the highest one would be most valuable to flow all year round, but it probably won’t be.
As people depend more and more on active pumping systems, they just leave these smaller springs be. They’re all getting full of sand and debris blocking them up. Forcing water where there is less resistance. Which could be you. Yippeee.

Furthermore, i do not believe members of the forum are actively encouraging people to grow with as little inputs possible. It’s hard enough as it is, feeding a family while screening for interesting crosses and keeping those alive for seedsaving. Would be counterproductive when you could have more seeds. You could always try to grow for droughtresistance on a not watered plot as an experiment and control.
Me i believe we should grow as much as we can with being energy efficient and enthousiastic and time efficient. But that’s different for everyone. Laziness is a selfdefeating umbrella terminology put there by the outside world. Why do meaningless tasks?
But there’s nothing meaningless about growing droughtresistant crops. Others in less fortunate situations might benefit from your work in future when you pass them your seeds. And if drought comes to your region you might benefit from getting those seeds back with the benefits of the work they’ve been doing on them. It’s a natural security investment, nothing could be more meaningful in my optics.
But i know folks who have a hoop house, drive in tons of manure , pump water in, buy plants from the industrial system , don’t save seeds, but they feed their family that way, very time efficiently. With the extra time he’s got bees, some cattle, grows trees, puts grafts on trees, works on the house. He thinks i’m “stupid” to safe these seeds, share them freely and grow “dirty” tasting veggies.
We’re all made of different stuff, these labels are amusing distractions.

[KadenceLunemann]

There are lots of ways to develop a spring. I’ll have to chat with my dad, he’s developed several springs here and we pipe it to where it’s needed.

I’m blanking on the names of techniques but if you have water right at/near the surface you can dig across it, lay in permeable fabric and some pipe and gravel, and direct the larger wet area into a single output that is more usable.
Dad’s actually doing some right now with the neighbor on a spot that’s just on their property but the water all moves down our side. I’ll see if I can get some pictures.

[Oogyboogawa (John Warren)]

Hmm… Well, a lot of our day today ended up being focused around more cosmic events.

(Note the planet Venus off to the right of the Sun. You don’t see THAT every day!!)

I didn’t have time to really do anything to the spring(s), but I did go out and look around a little bit again.

And I noticed that the flow rates were lower, but I’ve been kind of confused for a while trying to figure out why the flow of water out there tends to fluctuate the way it does WHEN it does.

It just now occurred to me to think that it could be related to the levels of the nearby lake. It is a manmade lake and the water level in the lake often correlates with recent rainfall, but it doesn’t always… like recently, I suspect they let a bunch of water out of the lake so that the main fishing dock out there wouldn’t be under water when the massive flood of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people swept through the county over the weekend to view the totality of the eclipse.

We’re on the other side of a ridge from the lake, but only a couple of miles away and I feel like that makes way more sense to me than any meaningful change in the amount of groundwater coming down the ridge or pushed up at this location from somewhere at a higher point (we’re actually fairly high on this particular ridge, if that makes sense? Which is really nice anytime there are flood warnings in the area…) in the same period of time.

It is something that has boggled me before, because I keep trying to associate it with rainfall events or something like that when I have seen a noticeable change in water flow. But I hadn’t thought about large amounts of water being let out of the local system through the dam.

This wasn’t part of my original question, but for those of you who know more, does it make sense that something like a significant change in water level at a nearby lake would cause a change in water pressure at a spring on my land?

It’s less common, but sometimes we also get significant rises in water level at the lake when it has rained a whole lot somewhere else but not necessarily here and they’ve let water out of one or two of the lakes upstream from us. I would be curious to see if I can catch the flow of water on our land before and after one of those events and see if it increases…

Random side note from while I was out wandering around… Found a plant I hadn’t noticed before. App on my phone ID’d it as wild indigo… My family wasn’t able to guess what color the blooms were on that one!

[JinTX (J. Youngman)]

That is Baptisia alba (White Wild Indigo)