Earth-Works Projects

Since we live on a well at the new house, we decided to get a little "creative" with watering the grass and plants.  We honestly have no idea yet how the well will do in the summer as one of our neighbors routinely runs their well dry.  Hopefully we are not in the same aquifer as them!

Our lawn is brand new this year, which means LOTS of watering.  Thankfully, so far we've had enough rain that we've only had to water a few times.  We have a small stream that runs on the northern side of our property.  The "stream" is made purely because the farmer across the road got tired of his fields flooding and convinced the town/state to put a culvert under the road and just dump the water onto our property.  Wonderful!

So since its not a "natural" stream, we have no problems damming it up for our own use!  :-)  Some water still does leak through and when the water level is over a certain amount, it flows through a pipe and goes down hill anyway.  Here's what our dam looks like:

Lots of sand bags from Amazon (you can get anything from Amazon!) and a leftover piece of drainage pipe make our dam.  On the left hand corner of the picture, you can see a black pipe.  This is the pipe that goes from the reservoir to the pump.  We're pretty psyched that this system actually works.  We've been able to water our grass a handful of times and the only thing we've used from the house is electricity to run the pump.

We've also used this to water our garden so far, which is pretty handy.  Eventually, we think we'll be able to run a soaker hose to the garden and just hook it up when we need to water.  However, at this point, we're going to wait to see how much water/rain we get in a summer and whether this area will completely dry up or not.  If it dries up a lot, then there's no point in investing in more hoses and such to water the plants.

And because I feel like this post needs some color to it....

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations