Paddling, Shopping, and Hooking Up Armstrong Valley Farm to Our New Water Well

Tuesday May 26, 2015 Guerneville CA.

Paddling

I was thinking I needed to go do some shopping for plumbing parts to hook the new well to my brothers garden. But first I decided to go down kayaking at Jenner and do the shopping after that.

It was overcast at Jenner as I pulled into the parking lot. A bit cool, but the wind was down. Most of the holiday people were gone and for some reason there weren’t a lot of birds around today either.

I put my boat in the water and paddled across to Penny Island. Since I went down to the river’s mouth yesterday, I decided to go up river today and that’s the way I headed.

Near the upper end of Penny Island, I paddled by these two male merganser ducks resting on the old log.mergansers

 

I took my time and worked my way up the river to just above eagle’s landing. Here I am cruising along the shoreline headed up the river.upriver

 

I didn’t go far

Like I said, there weren’t many birds around to watch, so I turned back down the river and sat here and there. I could see the cows across the river from me in the wild flowers taking it easy.bovines

 

Here I am headed back down the river going by eagle’s landing.russianriver

 

Two male mallard ducks were just hopping up on this old log as I went by them. I bet they are going to have a little snooze.ducks

 

As  I was paddling down the side of Penny Island, I ran into this great blue heron fishing in the weeds.heron

 

I watched it fish for a bit. It was catching little fish, like one to three inches long.blueheron

 

Called it a day

I left it and headed for the boat ramp as I decided to call it a day a bit early. Here I am headed for the boat ramp at the Jenner visitor center right up ahead.jenner

 

Did the shopping

I went on home and got my list for the plumbing stuff and headed to the shopping center to get what I needed. A couple hours later, I was home again and resting up contemplating what I needed to do to hook up all the water lines to the garden.

Moved the water filter

We had to move a water filter to this new spot and put in valves to service the water filter and control which way the water was to go to get to the vegetable garden.

Here’s the setup while we are waiting for the glue to dry. The red thing is the filter which will be installed as soon as we flush out the lines. This hookup was a little weird as the main pipe wasn’t going straightvalvespipe

 

Letting the glue set

But first we want to give the glue some time to dry, so I tell my brother I’ll be back just before dark to finish this project as he needed the water right away to water the garden as we dumped his old sandy well which was now disconnected.

Just before dark, I round up my brother and we turn on the water from the new well and flush the pipes.

Here’s Tom, my brother installing the water filter and everything is a go, working good. It’s starting to get dark.filter

 

Flushing the sand out of his pipes

Next we drove over to his garden where he had the upper faucets turned on, flushing the pipes. I put a white pot under a faucet as it was flushing and it got a lot of sand and dirt in it. We ran the faucets until the sand had almost stopped.

Then we moved down to his hot house and flushed the pipes. You can see how dirty things were.waterdirty

 

Clean pure water

Shortly after that, the water cleared up with lots more pressure then he had before so he was real happy with the water outcome. Tom, flushing the pipes.cleanwater

 

For now, we seem to have lots of water, but it is early in the year, so we’ll just have to use the water and see  how things hold up.

Another day gone by.

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