2013, a rebuilding year.

Life in the trenches:  Reburying the electric connection for the well house

 I'm feeling a bit scattered this year; the biggest thing that disrupted my usual farming calendar was the purchase of the new farm.  I made the offer in December, but we didn't actually close until May, and it wasn't clear until about a week before close that we would close. 

Now normally that wouldn't make much difference, but the late winter and early spring is the time when I usually firm up the plans for the coming year, and, in the case of things like turkeys and chickens, place my orders for the chicks and poults that I'd raise for the coming years production. 

It's interesting, but I feel like I've regressed a bit in my farming.  One step forward, two back.  I say this because my original farm was pretty much built out to be useful for my operations.  For the first 7 years there I spent the time building stuff, and I'd actually gotten it pretty much completely built out.  custom built, if you will. 

So I've been spending my time replacing the things that I'd built on the other farm.  This one will be great when I'm done, but right now I've got a punch list that I'm working down, one item at a time. 

The simplest thing, a good perimeter fence, is going up now.   I've regressed to the place I was in the first year or so of my farming venture, where I could not reliably keep animals on the property.  It's a lot of work, but no matter how much work, a good fence is well worth the effort. 

So as I work through the fencing project, as each portion of the fence is complete, I've been doing all of the improvements so that I can mark the newly fenced area off as "complete".  Things like water lines and gates, animal shelters and electrical. 

You can see the original power line; inches below the surface of the driveway

So I was working on the area around the well that supplies the water to the property.  It's an artesian well, and the water bubbles out of the well casing if it's not being drawn by the well pump, naturally. 
  I'm there because I fixed the water line leaks (by replacing the water line between the wellhouse and the barn), and this actually caused a problem; the water system doesn't leak, but all of the water that use to leak out of the water supply lines now pours out of the well, and it's making my backyard into a small pond. 
  So I'm working on putting in a small catch basin and drain line, to direct the water that is pouring from the well, and in doing so I forgot that the power line to the wellhouse was buried 6 inches or so under the ground, and cut it.  I knew it was there, and I had it marked, but I forgot that day.  So now my project becomes repairing the well house power supply.  So I dig out the trench, get the conduit and power line, and run the new power line across the yard, only to find that I hit some sort of drain that wasn't marked. close to the end of the powerline run.    It's a 3" line, plastic, hard to detect.  No idea where it goes.   

So my project then becomes trying to figure out what the drain line was from, and whether I need to repair it too. 

So I'll get up tomorrow, and figure out the drain, and repair it or not, then I'll figure out the wellhouse power supply, and fix it, and then I'll start work on the catch basin that I started working on today.  

Unless something else happens to come up while I'm working on one of these other things. 

Oh; this all happens with the normal backdrop of farming activities; milking two cows, 60 piglets farrowed, working on the sweet corn weeding and then my other full-time job, whatever that is.  I forgot.  Been a busy month.