Reviving My Gravity Fed Water for 5 Acres of Pasture

Got to get water to this side of the creek. There's the house, here's the other side of the creek, couple acres down here, and then 2 acres in the woods. It's too far for the well pump. And look, this got disturbed, so we've been pumping water all night. Well, we spritzed the auto float valve on here. Where's the auto float valve, guys? They got some hay. We're gonna need to move them by tomorrow. They've hay bombed this area. Lots of manure between the spent hay and their manure. It ought to build this topsoil back up fast. I mean, as fast as possible. 2 or 3 years. And right now I'm just running this hose through the creek to our source on the other side. That's not sustainable. Ultimately, we're going to have gravity-fed water over here. We already have a system. We just have to go and maintain it, get it going again. A water source on top of the mountain over there. This is not sustainable either. Where's my auto shut-off? Gideon, can you go get me an auto shut-off? We've got to put this auto float valve on there. Water fills up, takes this floater, shuts off the— shuts off the water so that we don't have to stand here monitoring this hose. I got that going. All right, that's neat because I can now just walk away and they'll never be out of water, so long as they don't knock that over. First thing we've got to do is assess. We will start at the bottom and work our way up. Wow. Okay, this is where our line was coming out. Wow, the boys have cleaned this up nicely. Wow. Wow. Organized our logs for our wood We got a metal pile going, all our totes. Here's our line. Is it salvageable? Ball valve's kind of busted. Good connection there. Lots of bents, dents. Jonah's burying stumps, make it look even better. Okay, I'm gonna try to salvage this. There's some bends in it, and like this bend is busted, it's going to leak, but it's at the end, so we could just make the new end right here. I examined another bend and it's not leaking, so I'm gonna hope there's not a whole lot of leaks in this. I would rather fix something as opposed to buy something. I got that long one out I just pulled out. There's one more medium here. So I've been working up here, Jonah's been working up here. Look at that soil. I've got to go get a walkie-talkie, mine died, so hang out and watch Jonah for a bit. Jonah did a good job. Just needs to be smoothed out with the track loader. Lily, you want to finish assessing? Whoa, okay, this tricked me for a second. I thought there's water coming down, and maybe there is a little bit. No, I think we got water here. Something's leaking, means we have water here. Now we're gonna go up through here and look for any cuts, any leaks, anything disattached, the connections. Okay, see, we got water, so we'll check all the valves. We're looking good up through here, but what we need to do up here— let's just clean out the water collection. Let's just check the tank. Oh, it's full. This is good. My overflow pipe is in. We were supposed to be bypassing that, but oh well. There's barely any water coming in. We're going to need to trace this line back up to our— what you call a weir— and see how it's collecting water. It probably needs cleaned out. Okay, we have a good amount of water coming onto that. We could add more. This is dammed up over here. Let's put the dam over there. This has gotten blocked with soot— not soot, uh, silt. My guess, with the amount of silt belt on there, but this weir has filled up with sediment. From what I can tell, it has. It's a wonder any water is going through there. I think it's slap full of sediment. We got a project ahead of us. There you are. And then I came out and I couldn't see you, so I was worried about you. I wanted to come get this. Oh, we need to get a drill driver. And fix our weir. Fixing our own things now. You know, before, hyper-focused on growing our own food, getting our systems in place, you know, building this stuff like Everflow Water. It's, it's one thing to come today and repair it and get it going. It's a whole other thing to build it. That takes time and commitment. But now we have time and older boys to start fixing our own stuff. What? What is this? Guess. Is this the patch? Yeah. Or is that an old one? That's the patch. Good job, guys. That's blowing up. Well, test it, test it. I've seen some crazy videos on the internet. Johnny, that'll be so loud and could blow you in a circle. This is a compact driver, not a drill driver. Is that it? That's the socket drill. All right, you can't get it back on now that you have it full, huh? You could put that down and then put it on a board so it doesn't sink in the ground. Just says in there Fixing the tire. About this fixing thing project, when you first start out with homesteading, you have to really know why you're doing it or have your goal. And for example, for us, it's been about growing our own food, but there can be a lot of good distractions that come with homesteading, like self-sustenance, like fixing your own things, growing your own heat for wood in the, in the summer, making your own compost, breeding and hatching your own chicks. There are all these kinds of things that are good, but the reality is there's only so much time in the day. You are only so many people. You can't do it all, or you don't, you know, you— yeah, you can't do it all. So for years we worked hard, and you know, our kids were young, so Rebecca and I were doing more of everything. We had to establish these food growing systems because that was our priority. We cannot buy this quality of food, so we have to grow it ourselves. So we find ourselves in this neat spot now where We've always wanted to, you know, fix our own flats, right? It's not my natural inclination or desire, so that's been a little bit of an extra struggle. But it's neat that we've come to this point of establishing our systems, and at the same time, our children are growing up. Like, even, even today, if I didn't have them— let's be real, I've got to fix this gravity-fed water system, and I'm going to run out of time, and I wouldn't have time to fix this, so I'd need to call Mark. And that's smart. That's smart. That's buying time because nobody can fix the gravity-fed water line. Only I know that system. That's wise. So young people with young kids, hang in there, okay? Hang in there. Keep chugging away, keep building at the foundations of your farm, and then one day you'll be able to stand on them. Josiah, so proud of you, man. There was a day that I was just having you along and you're just playing in the woods beside me. I'm looking for you. And now you're fixing tires while I'm setting up the water. At this point— oh, right, top of the mountain, ma'am. At this point, I'll be extremely happy if we can just get the weir cleaned out and water coming down back to where it was down here. We might not get the line all the way to the cows today, but here, I'll show you. They're right here today. Then this, all this hose we found today. What we got to do is take this top off and dig out the rear of all its silt. This thing captures the water and puts it in this little pipe right here, and then that little pipe— so this is a filter that has gotten clogged, filled up. Let's open that up. Okay. Oh, it's not so full of mud. It's blocked. It's blocked it though. Let's clean that out. You know what, we're gonna have to pull this off too. Yeah, you think we're clogged up? I think we're clogged up. It's only let this, this little fine— well, we got a half-inch wire mesh, and then we've got a fine wire mesh. I already hear the tank running better. And then another half-inch, and that's kept out everything but a really fine silt. And we're getting here just in time because it hasn't reached our outlet. Look at this, look how fine that is. It's a real fine sand. All right, I'm encouraged here. We got it cleared out. Listen, you can hear it just sucking it down. Going fast now, look at that. Hey, listen, it's sucking now. Let's go see if it's coming through the tank. We've done it! We've got water coming out. That means our tank is filling up, and when we call on it, we'll just pull 50 to 100 gallons out and it'll just fill right back up. It's a 225-gallon tank. Oh yeah, they were full. We're flowing fast. If getting that Tank going better is the cake. This is the icing if we can get this line going back at least to where it was down at the creek. I salvaged the line. It actually does go all the way back down to the creek, so I salvaged the entire line. Now the Festivus miracle will be I get the water going down through here, we don't have any leaks. Yeah! There's all that water in the tank. It's probably 80 feet vertical up from here, maybe 100. It's gonna be a lot of pressure. Something's blowing. Okay, blew this off, but we've been blowing it. Those are those temporary— well, those are those quick clinks. Or— I'm not surprised. I mean, it was gonna be pretty lucky to— oh, we got a problem there too. Turn me off right there, Jonah. See this? This blew off the end here, and this is a T. And it just blew it out. It's good to let it run a little bit actually because it's getting some of that sediment out of there. See, it's brown water. That's a break in one of those kinks. A pretty easy fix. I cut out the, the leaky part and I put a male-to-male adapter in there. Let's see if we're making it all the way to the creek. It's the big test. Oh, I think I see water coming out the end. Mucho agua. Let's just replace it. 100 more feet, we'll be watering the cows and we'll be watering this 2 acres down there. I'm excited. That's going to need to be tomorrow. We did it, we got our cake and our icing too. Happy day. See y'all tomorrow.