Flowers and PEX pipe

Last week, on Tuesday, we got out to the farm. Didn’t get as much done as we had hoped, but we did make some forward progress.

We planted asparagus, and wild flowers.

The flowers will border parts of the garden. It is always a good idea to interplant flowers, or at least have them on the ends and borders of the garden. They attract pollenators and they look pretty, two very important and often underrated parts of having a homestead or a garden.

We mulched around some currants. Seppi did a lot of that himself. He is a good digger, and while he is still too small to move a lot of the actual dirt with rocks in it (he’s only three, cut him some slack!) the wood chips are just his speed and a great training tool.

Little Man!

Then we went out into the pasture to continue work on the water line. Most of the work was just screening the fill back into the trench to form a rock-free bed for the PEX pipe. If there are large rocks pressing on the pipe, over a few years of freeze-thaw (of which there shouldn’t be any at that depth anyway) and shifting back and forth with the changes in water pressure, a rock could, theoretically, wear a hole in the pipe.

Now, while we do have sand to put in there, we can’t exactly move loads of sand in the back of the car and Mommy had the truck at work so we went back to screened fill for this portion.

Ellie’s signature photographic touch, the finger in one corner of the picture.

Winnie was not a fan of the heat and sun, and, as it turned out that night, she was coming down with a cold, so she wanted to be up on Daddy most of the time we were out there.

This necessarily slows down the progress on the work, but that is just part of having little kids on a homestead.

Daddy’s straw hat is a good sun shade for a baby girl, when she keeps it on her head.

We got the pipe covered another 40 or 50 feet, enough that we figured one good truckload of sand would very quickly finish the rest of it, or an hour or two of screening dirt. We also got the last connections put together and hydrants put in, all except…

Short by one crimp ring. Ryan ordered enough when he started the project, but then put a few in wrong and had to cut them off, and then spoiled a few with improperly crimping at awkward angles, and the end result was when we got to the end, the pipe was not attached to the final hydrant, so we still could not turn the water on.

Oh well, has to wait until next time. That’s just part of having a homestead that’s only a part time hobby.