Again, no RE info in this post. But this summer has just kept me busy with some other country related projects. My parents have about 15 acres that they live on, and I've been living far away and in different states since I graduated high school. So this year I've made it a point to spend some time with them and help get caught up on various things.
When my parents bought a piece of their land, there was an area that was claimed to be a spring. The area around it was always wet, and there was a slight depression in the ground. A couple years ago, my dad started digging it out. He dug out a circle about 4ft across and 3ft deep. He ran into some stone wall that was originally there probably from the early 1900's, when it was a functioning spring. By this summer, however, enough dirt, sticks, leaves and other debris had washed in that it wasn't even 2ft deep.
We attempted to dig it out again, and this time put some kind of shelter over it to keep debris from filling it in so quickly. As I was digging, I hit the rock wall dad had found a couple years before, but I also found a rock ledge in the back that an old neighbor had told us about. When I found that, I continued digging towards the back and found more old stone walls, turning the circular spring into more of a keyhole shape. The idea was that the spring water ran down the angled rock ledge into the round basin, that the original diggers had carved out of the sandstone rock.
Here is one of the walls we found from the original spring. The bottom is still very sturdy due to the consistently sized rocks and the circular shape. The top part was added by me and isn't quite as solid. I was working with a lot of small irregular sized stones, since somebody used all my good rocks on a
fountain.
This is the empty spring once we had excavated all the muck we could from it, and rebuilt the walls up to a common height. You can see the circular section cut out of the sandstone, and the angled ledge I mentioned.
Once we had the spring the way we wanted, we played around with some different ways to cover it. We decided on a couple sections of fence, turned upside down and joined together with screws and a landscape timber at the top. After a little bracing it was ready to go. Since this picture was taken there have been a lot of leaves fall, and only a small amount of them have fallen in the spring. The spring also holds about 4 or 5 times as much water as it did previously. The frogs love it. (Note: The water meter base is just there as a junction for the overflow pipe in the spring, to the drain tile down the hill.)
This spring doesn't have near enough flow to make any kind of power. It is just a constant trickle all year round. We use it to water the catnip patch, clean up after camping, and various other things where it's nice to have some free fresh water. And hopefully it will be a while before we have to clean it out again.
