Developing a Spring

Joe BanksI'd need to pipe the water from the spring direct to the creek to dry out the area, [/quote wrote:

I have also tried this - but it did not work (at least when you area dealing with a spring in clay and fractured rock). The fact is, water seeps VERY well, and it will drive you crazy to try and stop it from doing its thing. Maybe if you had water gushing out of a crack in some granite, you could make it pour out of a pipe into a nice neat and tidy little basin, but in my experience, if there is soil, there will also be mud. What I ended up with was a compromise. I sealed up my spring, including a little brick wall with a pipe in it. My flow is only about 1.5gpm, so I have a little basin behind my brick wall that is about a cubic foot. I dug out all the muck behind the dam and replaced it with clean sand, gravel, and rocks. The pipe carries most of the water down to a concrete tank that I have my well pump in, and a little water dribbles over my brick wall into the mud. This also leaves the original stream more or less intact. I really dont use that much of the water, so I am really just borrowing most of it. I think fighting nature is a fools errand, as we are all part of nature. I have yet to meet another species that asks to use any of my stuff, though, so by all means, take what you need. I think its just when we get greedy that problems start to arise. And speaking of problems, if you have a spring on your property, it might end up being easier to fight gravity than stubborn neighbors. If you have even a few feet of head and a gpm or two, a ram pump might be just the thing.

Carl Nystrom wrote:

Joe BanksI'd need to pipe the water from the spring direct to the creek to dry out the area, [/quote wrote:

I have also tried this - but it did not work (at least when you area dealing with a spring in clay and fractured rock). The fact is, water seeps VERY well, and it will drive you crazy to try and stop it from doing its thing. Maybe if you had water gushing out of a crack in some granite, you could make it pour out of a pipe into a nice neat and tidy little basin, but in my experience, if there is soil, there will also be mud. What I ended up with was a compromise. I sealed up my spring, including a little brick wall with a pipe in it. My flow is only about 1.5gpm, so I have a little basin behind my brick wall that is about a cubic foot. I dug out all the muck behind the dam and replaced it with clean sand, gravel, and rocks. The pipe carries most of the water down to a concrete tank that I have my well pump in, and a little water dribbles over my brick wall into the mud. This also leaves the original stream more or less intact. I really dont use that much of the water, so I am really just borrowing most of it. I think fighting nature is a fools errand, as we are all part of nature. I have yet to meet another species that asks to use any of my stuff, though, so by all means, take what you need. I think its just when we get greedy that problems start to arise. And speaking of problems, if you have a spring on your property, it might end up being easier to fight gravity than stubborn neighbors. If you have even a few feet of head and a gpm or two, a ram pump might be just the thing.

The night I devoured all of the spring videos on youtube, I got the chance to hear a ram pump working. If it was a typical example, I'd rather haul buckets of water for eternity than listen to it! :D
I think me and the crawdaddies made a good compromise for the time being. They dug into the base of the rock/clay dam, but the dam is still there, and because I dug out all of that clay, I have about a 1 ft x 1 ft x 1 ft hole of clear water behind it. Water is seeping to the right of it, but what's coming from the spring I targeted is already more water than I could use. Fighting nature is certainly asking water to defy gravity! I'm a bit of a deededee, and have a lot of things I want to do on the lot, but working six days a week sure makes it difficult/impossible. Your implementation of a concrete tank with well pump down from the spring sounds perfect. If I already had electricity there it would be the answer. Only, my concrete tank with pump would have to be watertight, since this creek floods over the level of the spring regularly. Now I've moved on to rocks. While I wait for my vine destroying light saber to come in the mail, I've been reading Ked Kerns' book on stone masonry as well as forums. Reason is, lumber is expensive, I don't have the tools to mill my own wood, and stones are everywhere on the property. Beginning of the book has a good quote (paraphrased): God gave us earth for food, wood for making furniture, and stone for building houses.

While environmentally savvy gardeners seek to reduce pesticide use, this is one plant it would be best not to try to control solely by manual methods.
In combination with chemical controls, methods such as cutting or hand digging can be effective for established populations over time.
Herbicides can be applied to freshly cut stems or through other techniques.
Refer to a Michigan DNR fact sheet for best control practices of Oriental bittersweet.