We decided that walking up the hill to fill the chicken and turkey water was becoming a bit too tedious. Granted it is good exercise, it is kind of a pain. Since it is a pain the turkeys and chickens sometimes let us know that they are out of water by following us around. The whole flock. It is kind of funny, but also can be a reminder that getting them water is a chore. The distance from the cabana to the turkey coop is about a football field (down, then UP hill).
We figured that since we put the coops along the property line, we could also drop in a new PVC water line along the border. This serves two purposes. Easy to water the birds, but also the plants.
It is pretty dry in Rincón during the winter. It is nice because the humidity drops as well as the temps just a few degrees. It really does feel perfect out, but the plants and especially the new plants have to be watered. We have been dragging around 150ft of hose to do the task, but since we have expanded our area of planting, we think it is time to expand our infrastructure.
Truck with Pipes
We are now clearing/planting almost to the end of the property line on one side, we are putting down lots of grass seed and we spend quite a bit of time “down below”. The mower, the chainsaw all the gardening equipment is starting to live at the turkey coop for convenience. Having a water tap will be perfect!
A nice thing about living in the tropics VS a temperate climate is that I don’t have to bury the water lines. It makes finding and fixing leaks easier as well as installation. There really is no need to bury the line. Not that it makes laying 400 feet of pipe thru the jungle easy, but if I had to bury the pipe I would probably not be doing it!
Ducking Under the Mandarin Tree
We have installed the new system and I had to fix a few leaks due to hooking up to some old PVC that was dirty. Lesson learned, sand/clean the old pipe before cementing. I should have known because I have worked with copper pipe quite a bit, oh well. If you want it done right, do it thrice!
New Faucet On The Coop
This project cost ~$150 more or less. We decided to do this because it actually made our lives easier. We had thought about installing a rain catchment system but did the calculations and decided that for the amount of water we use, it was far cheaper to use the water system already setup and maintained by the city. Plus we have a reserve built up in the lines to our house, so there would be little to no gain and more maintenance and cost. When we build the main house, we may setup a rain catchment off the gutters/roof.
In either case we planted lots of grass seed, planted new trees, transplanted trees and watered the birds with ease today!