In Day 48 of the "100 Days Building a Homestead" series, the crew deals with a surprise overnight pig escape, including a pregnant sow, and quickly repairs the broken fence using T‑posts and wire. While corralling the pigs back into their pen and preventing them from harming the chicken coop, they also begin a systematic search for a reliable spring water source. The team evaluates a possible culvert versus a spring, measures flow rates, calculates elevation‑based water pressure, and digs a gravity‑fed ditch to capture water for livestock. Throughout, they coordinate tasks with a drone, motorcycle, and various helpers, discuss water‑use calculations, and plan to test water quality later. The vlog blends hands‑on problem solving, animal husbandry, and early water‑infrastructure planning.
Chapters
Day 48 of 100 Days Building a Homestead. Almost to day 50. We are in hunt of a spring today. We found one yesterday. Is that the highest source we have? Can we track it up and find a cleaner source? We're gonna find out today. But first, we gotta deal with a surprise situation. The pigs getting out last night and one of them being almost due. Juna looked out this door and he said, oh my God, there's Beefcake. Sure enough. Hopefully he hadn't been up all night terrorizing the homestead. There's another one out. Beefcake's down by the high tunnel. It's funny, they get out and then want right back in. First we have to find where and how they got out. I'm super relieved they did not get out here. It's going to be an impossible case if they did, because what are we going to do to keep them in? Look, it's like he wants back in. This is down. That's that wall. Oh, they just busted right through that wire. They just barged right through that, didn't they? Let's just jerry-rig this back up and then we can go get stuff going. Oh, you found a scam, huh? Two T-posts and this wire. That's all we need. I thought we were gonna have a nice leisure morning till Eric, our spring guy, gets here at 9. Now we got like 40 minutes till 8, and we really need to start doing chores by 8. Here, big, big, big, big, big.
Come on, come on.
You guys have been out exercising all night. Wow, we've got him in the pen in with the chickens. He's not with the pig pen. We need to be in here messing with this. They're crazy. I think we only have till they get done eating that and then they're gonna just start destroying the egg-laying box, the waterer. Did you find her? What? This is very, very strange.
I think he could have gone to To the lake property?
It's possible. She's left them. That's not typical. My goal is gonna have to be two pigs that we do have back in their pig pen before they terrorize the chicken area. Jonah is getting the drone up. That's a good idea. Josiah's running around on his motorcycle, also a good idea. I think I might have put this post in a little further out there. It's better than it was. It's one extra support. We put the extra support in the corner.
Find it? No.
Really?
Yeah.
Got it secured. three ways. Let's see if we can get this big bad boy in back. Come on, come on. Big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, Big.
Okay.
One in. That one's just getting the chicken feed. That was easy. Spok. Turn around. There you go. Good. Now to the bigger problem: missing pig. This is maybe where I would be if I was a pig. I might be trying to get with my babies or cousins, nieces and nephews. I had Josiah go down the road. It's the last thing we want is them to be terrorizing a neighbor. Thankfully the neighbors are half a mile away. Wait a minute, how did you get out? Did you find her?
She's right here!
You found her! Rebecca literally just came down and said she's probably buried in somewhere.
I told you, I was like, I, I was texting Lorraine, I was like, we lost the pig. I was like, she's just buried in there somewhere asleep.
She's tired, she probably had a wild night. Wait, Becky, Becky, don't get hurt. We had the great chicken roundup, put everybody in the high tunnel. Either this one has gotten out or never got up. Yeah, get her in that corner and we're good.
Okay.
Yeah, get her in there. I'm not— I'm just trying to watch you do this. That's one reason why she's out. No way! A bunch of chickens just got out down here. I never put the gate back.
Come on. Now they're kind of afraid.
Wow, okay, that was very lucky.
Exactly what they were saying. That was lucky.
Are you a boss baby? Look at it, he's on a mission, buddy. He ain't even acknowledging me. There she is. I thought she said she was waking up.
She was.
Come on, put that in front of her nose just so Whoa, she's red.
Come on, let's go. You're good. Sally, she's struggling.
It's like she knows where to go. Okay, we're going to watch the race, then I— Here, just go open the door.
Oh.
Good, we did it! She is definitely gonna have her babies, so we must get her separated out from the others, Beefcake, so she can start eating all she needs. Oh my gosh, she is so having these babies! All right, I had to send Jonah and Lily to milk. Jonah cannot stand milking. He hasn't done it in a long time. We'll see how that goes, but I gotta go.
What do you think, dude?
You look like you're starving to death. Imagine that guy out all night. Let's give her her water. We may be leaking a hair because I had to do that bad drill job. I tried to salvage this barrel, but I'm just gonna have to do another barrel. So we're out here clearing yesterday, and look at this. So somebody put a rock wall there. Jonah kind of thinks that's a culvert. Do we have a spring right here, or is that a creek gone under? Underwater. Well, we got Base Camp WNC here. If anybody can help us figure it out, it's Eric. And I don't know if he's right and it's a culvert that's draining. Yeah, or you're looking for a culvert then. You found a culvert?
Is that a rock?
Might be a rock. I think it's a rock. Parts of me wants it to be a culvert and a little creek underground. Another part of me wants it to be a spring. I'd rather spring be higher up. We could gravity feed the pretty place from here, but that's about it.
No culvert, plenty of rocks.
How many gallons a minute you reckon that is?
Well, the way you base it on that theory, if it's 1 gallon a minute, there's 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, that's 1,440 minutes. It's a lot of spring. So that's 1440 gallons.
That's a lot.
It's a half a gallon, that's 720 gallons a day. That's still more water than you're ever going to use unless you got a pile of livestock.
So we're going to hike up a little bit and see if we can't find the source. See, this has had some significant water in it. Yeah, don't you think? To be ravined out 3 feet.
But I mean, you're also in the lowest section of this land. Yeah, which would be the natural flow.
Okay.
Wow, look how muddy.
He's definitely found water here. Is this a water system flowing down, or is this a number of springs?
That you don't know.
I think we can go higher, Eric. What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, we just keep—
hey, the higher we can go and find water, the better, right?
Right.
Well, we hiked all the way to the top of the mountain. I believe we found our our highest possible spot. Sally got us to spot number 2. What's our elevation?
2,450. Okay, the house is 2,300, so if you got 150 foot, you got 75 pounds of pressure in theory going from here to there.
You'll tap it here, you'll have your barrel down there. You'd collect off that bottom rock or maybe this middle rock here?
Probably collect off of this one.
Okay.
And put the weir down here.
Okay.
So it runs down.
So we'll get this cleared up for you by the time you get back. We'll clear this out, we'll saw in here. We got to get all this brush out of here, Jesse. Hey, we'll see you, Eric. Thank you. I'm gonna go do my homework. I know what I want to get you for your birthday— a Y bike. Yeah. Okay, let's go, guys.
Let's go.
We gotta get this to not be a puddle. This has got to start running again, so we need to dig down far enough to where there's not a puddle here. Hey, where are you going? We're gonna be right here, bro. Josiah, you want to watch Henry? All right, I'll dig. We've come across some huge rocks.
There's already a big hole We got it flowing out good.
That was a bit more entailed than I thought. Let's hope this second one is a little more— I don't know, we need a steeper runoff and then we'll have to dig so far of a ditch. See that little hole right there? Yeah. Yep, dig a ditch from this water source to that hole. That turned out being easier than I expected. About a quarter of the way through, we found another— let's just call it a sinkhole. It's a hole where the water's been running underground. See the water coming out there? Is that a spring or a creek?
That's probably a spring.
There was one other spot higher up where you could see water was getting down into the earth. I'd like to see if we couldn't find something slightly above that. Like two holes here, 30 feet from that water runoff from the mountain. It's just gonna go down in there. This is gonna lead into that water we catch there. And it's of course going to be dirtier because we're going to have that surface runoff water. It's dammed up there, it's like a pool there. Lots of water would catch in there, like a pond. So all that water catchment would go this way if there's a spring here. Burn is maybe a good sign. It's pretty dry dirt. Let's go see if Mama Pig has had her babies. I wish we had found a spring higher up. This is what it is. We found a spring. Well, we found two possible taps for the spring. We've got a good water source up at the top of the mountain for the livestock. There's plenty of fall down to the pasture. Water is a critical step. It's going to be one of those to be continued. We've cleaned this out. Eric will come back and we'll test this water. And see how clean it is. If it's like super clean, the most cleanest spring on the farm, we might be talking about some redundancy for our own house. Oh my gosh, those have just swollen! She can have those babies any minute. Still hasn't eaten. All right, stay tuned. Any day on her, happy day.
