Do We Have Water?

Añadido: 2026-05-09

[00:00:07]We knew about the pond, the spring, and the well, but we don't know much else.

[00:00:13]And today, we're going to unpack the spring.

[00:00:17]Until we have time to clean up our trails and our roads, boots on the ranch are a must. And mostly because we have ticks. As far as I'm concerned, ticks have VIP parking in hell. Later on, we're going to meet another critter that makes me want to leave the sneakers at home and wear boots all the time and perhaps even upgrade to those cowboy boots.

[00:00:47]There's a pipe going that way and a pipe going that way. I'm almost positive the water is coming from that way, but I have to I can't hear anything.

[00:01:02]>> Let's Let's see where it comes from.

[00:01:16]It's not coming from this way. I don't think it's just going downhill to the pond. I don't think it's coming uphill and going this way. So, we're going to walk this way.

[00:01:30]Okay, spring one.

[00:01:34]Now, I've walked this path dozens of times. It's about 500 ft long, and I've been spending the majority of my time really trying to canvas the rest of the property. As you can imagine, there are countless projects and jobs and things to figure out and learn. We should have power pretty soon. So, now it's time to figure out the water. The first task is to identify how many sources we have. It looks like there's two, but there might be three. I'm doing my best to record every new flower or insect that I find.

[00:02:14]>> They're like poof balls. I mean, they're clovers. I'm almost positive they're clovers, but some have like the yellow flowers out of the top like those that are really cool. And some don't have them yet, I guess, or ever.

[00:02:32]Or I don't know. I got to figure out why that is. But those look like super those look like some Super Mario Brothers flower.

[00:02:42]It's rad.

[00:02:52]You'll notice here that I'm finding all sorts of disconnected PVC pipes.

[00:02:59]Everything that's not hooked up and functioning right now, I'm going to drag it down off the landscape. And right now, I'm just working to find the source of this spring.

[00:03:27]Oh, here.

[00:03:33]Okay.

[00:03:38]Hear the water.

[00:04:00]Whoa.

[00:04:01]Cool.

[00:04:03]Okay, so that water is flowing. Oh, big pipe.

[00:04:08]Big pipe here. And there's another pipe here.

[00:04:15]Okay.

[00:04:17]Uh, all right. Keep going.

[00:04:29]That might be a spring.

[00:04:31]But we're uh kind of at a dead end. I need to get the shovel and come back and dig this.

[00:04:37]like 30 or 40 foot section up. But there are rocks over here and there's a nice erosion gully.

[00:04:48]It kind of goes this way and then winds down into that tree.

[00:04:53]Um, but these rocks are going to be perfect for building some rock dams in the near future. I'm really excited about that.

[00:05:06]But because we live in California, I need some permits. So, I think I need two. Um, but yeah, we're going to try and get this whole section in here permitted. We're going to put together a team of friends and family and people who are interested in learning about rock dams and uh slowing water down. And I think we're going to use these rocks to start plugging this up. And we're going to find some vegetation from some of the down trees to lay in here to uh pretend like we're beavers.

[00:05:43]I lost it right down there.

[00:05:48]All right.

[00:05:50]Okay. It's tool time. Those who've worked with me or lived with me for that matter know that I get pretty distracted by visual noise. Piles of clutter, something out of place. So, I do my best every day that I'm on the ranch to clean stuff up. It was time for this piece of sheet metal to get put away.

[00:06:10]>> Yep. Good. Nope.

[00:06:14]>> In case you're curious, uh the sheet metal is still there, but uh I moved this guy to somewhere a little safer on the ranch.

[00:06:25]>> This is a baby northern Pacific rattlesnake. And um yeah, they still have venom.

[00:06:34]You're good.

[00:06:36]You're good.

[00:06:53]That's the neighbor's property. And it sure would be nice to have a fivep person crew, but it's just me out here today. Whenever I'm starting a new project, especially when I'm picking up the pieces of someone else's project, I like to tidy up and take stock of what we have. There's an expression to always be nulling, and it's been popularized by the artist Tom Saxs, who at the time was working for the architect Frank Giri in the late 80s. And there was a janitor named Andrew Chromlo who at the end of every evening would come in and clean up the studio. He developed this really simple, brilliant process of tidying up.

[00:07:35]And it involved really three steps and it's to get rid of everything that's no longer in use. Next, you group like objects. And then you align everything to either the environment or the studio in that case or themselves. And what you're left with is just a really great layout of everything that you're using.

[00:07:55]And it looks clean and orderly. That was satisfying. Okay, so here's the first spring. Let's take a look what's going on here. Not much flow. This one's pretty straightforward.

[00:08:09]Okay, on to the second source. This is where all the water sounds are coming from. So, I'm really curious to find out. Hey, banana slug. Sorry, buddy. Over here.

[00:08:26]Uh, I'm really curious to find out if the water is coming from this direction or this direction. The best way, I guess, is to just cut the pipe. And um so I'm gonna leverage it up and put this underneath it.

[00:08:53]All right, here we go.

[00:09:02]All right, water's coming from that way.

[00:09:08]Now we know this fiberglass water tank has seen better days. So before we can design a new system, we need to dismantle the old one.

[00:09:21]Okay. So, what you saw me do there where I tipped that pipe up, I don't realize it quite yet, but uh that's the third source. And while I don't know much about springs, I do know that you're not supposed to stop them from flowing.

[00:09:41]>> Whoa. I think it'll be okay, though.

[00:09:43]>> Eureka. Okay. I think we found it.

[00:09:46]That's awesome.

[00:09:48]So, I found a third source, and in all the excitement, I decided to test this one first.

[00:09:59]Next up was the big one. And this is the one that we identified in the last video as the one that was just spouting water.

[00:10:07]>> There's still a fair amount of mystery as to where this one is coming from, actually.

[00:10:12]>> Oh, here we go. Here we go. And 44 seconds.

[00:10:21]That's better.

[00:10:24]And last but not least, I hooked the original spring up to a long pipe just to get the bucket on flat ground.

[00:10:33]I almost forgot about this one. It's so slow. I couldn't wait for this one to wrap up because uh it was hot. This one came in at 10 minutes and 53 seconds.

[00:10:45]So, in summary, we have water and we have fairly decent flow. The main question now is whether or not we'll have the same flow year round. We measured the new source first at 7 minutes and 30 seconds, followed by the big one that was gushing water out of that pipe, and last and absolutely least, the original and obvious source.

[00:11:13]You might be asking yourself, how much water is that? 7.9 gall per minute will fill this 550gal tank up in a little over an hour. This 1,550gal tank will take 3 hours and 16 minutes.

[00:11:28]It will fill this 2500galon tank in 5 hours and 16 minutes. And it will fill this 3,000galon tank in 6 hours and 20 minutes. And then it'll fill this 6,000galon tank in under 13 hours. But which one makes sense for us?

[00:11:49]Only time will tell.

[00:11:52]Going myself, talking to myself, talking to my phone.

[00:11:57]All by myself in the middle of nowhere.

[00:12:00]What the