Spring Water

Does anybody here use spring water on their gardens?

Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to a college student talk about spring water and how she takes several glass bottles to this nature spring outside of the city to use for drinking and cooking.  The spring is free and accessible to the public if you know where it is located.  I know as of last night.

This girl talked about how spring water is the first action to take toward eliminating halides from the body.  She explained that decalcification of the pineal gland which includes removing fluoride from the brain and restoring cognitive function back to where it should be can eliminate most of human dementia.

This girl happens to be a Mensa member, and her IQ is north of 200, so her talk had clout.

I don't think I can fill up enough bottles to water a garden with this spring water, but I just wondered if anybody here uses spring water (not store-bought) to water their gardens.

If we had one, that's absolutely what I'd use, not only for the bodily health benefits, but also for utility bill reasons.  I'd make sure to get the water tested first, just to make sure there aren't any industrial pollutants.

My future dream property has both a spring and a well, and a little creek that winds prettily through the lower section of our acreage.

Blanket statements about "springs" aren't doing anyone any favors.  Each spring is different, and each will have different things in them day by day and season by season.

All it takes is a little seasonal flooding or the entry of decaying matter or some pollution to change a spring's composition for a day, a week, or effectively forever.  At least as far as you're concerned, if you happen to drink the waters on any particularly unlucky day.  Some parasites and bacteria are naturally endemic in certain areas, so if you go right to the horse's mouth for them, don't be surprised if you get them.

People and animals have been drinking from springs and other natural bodies of water since nature began, but they've been getting sick and riddled with parasites for just as long.  There's a reason that water purification tablets and filters and other systems are sold to campers.

What's more, the minerals and other "good" things you might hope for in a spring might not necessarily be there.  Different regions will have different water compositions.

So the advice to drink spring water to do any particular thing besides hydrate yourself is poor.  And you can hydrate yourself with any kind of water, dirty or clean, and many other types of liquids.  Simply boiling the water people in England drank, in order to make tea, resulted in a huge increase in public health once tea became fashionable, as it helped control so many diseases.  Drinking beer did the same in the early Americas and parts of Europe, as the lightly alcoholic brew was actually safer to drink than water!  

The truth is not everything in nature is benign and lots of "unnatural" things count as progress.

I spent 5 years in the Drinking Water System Program, inspecting and testing private and public water systems.  Definitely get the spring water tested for total coliform bacterial, primary and secondary minerals, uranium, and gross alpha and beta as a minimum, and industrial pollutants if applicable to the area.  As water travels through rock, it picks up minerals, both the good and possibly the bad.  The general watershed should be researched.  How is the rock fractured?  One man's "spring" may be contaminated with another man's up spring septic system.  One private spring stands out in my mind.  Someone had driven a pipe into a weeping hillside and installed a 5-gallon bucket as the collection box, with a pipe then running downhill to the residence.  Inside the box were 2 salamanders in a moment of privacy.  There goes the fecal coliform count.

I see Marc replied while I was composing.

Marc and Sanderson make valid points.  

I rely upon my trusty water purifier with UV lights that eliminate bacteria and viruses and filters out 140 possible contaminants.

Marc, I remember at school learning that the health of English people improved when they had access to tea cheap enough to afford to buy it, and that  the improvement was due to boiling the water.

That, of course, was due to unintended consequences, otherwise they would have  boiled their drinking water before then.

I love the idea of natural spring water. It makes the best beer too! BUT: To echo Sanderson and Marc: Please have the water tested. Regularly. It may be fine, but it is very easy for ground water to get infected. Google "Walkerton e.coli outbreak" and read some of the accounts. (Walkerton is a nearby town). Twenty-five hundred people in a town of 5000 were infected via contaminated untreated groundwater, and seven died. All it took was a wet month a field of milk cows and an inattentive operator. Your "spring" doesn't have any operator.

Kelejan wrote:Marc, I remember at school learning that the health of English people improved when they had access to tea cheap enough to afford to buy it, and that  the improvement was due to boiling the water.

That, of course, was due to unintended consequences, otherwise they would have  boiled their drinking water before then.

I read about it in A History of the World in Six Glasses:

http://www.amazon.com/History-World-6-Glasses-ebook/dp/B002STNBRK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1437605054&sr=1-1&keywords=a+history+of+the+world+in+6+glasses

It's about how beer, wine, tea, spirits, coffee, and cola have played major roles in economies, history, and cultures worldwide. Really a great read.

This spring is located on the side of a large rock formation that is part of a larger plateau.  The water comes through multiple layers of rocks and behind this area is undeveloped forest.

The young lady that told me about the spring has had it tested recently, and it is 99+% pure.  It also tests as alkaline.

She adds boron tablets to the water as well because she says the boron will decalcify the brain and pineal gland, which in turn will restore cognitive function destroyed by consumption of halides like chloride and fluoride.  She showed scientific studies that connect halides with brain dementia and that they are mutagens. 

I have maybe 2,000 or more hours in naturopathic/holistic research and actually have an N.D. degree which I don't use for anything other than being able to call myself Doctor.  Pineal Gland stimulation and decalcification is not something I have ever researched, so I cannot comment on it, and I don't go for things like astral projection or other metaphysical things.  My wife is probably one of the most competent amateur hypnotists and NLP practitioners, and she and her friends don't even believe in most of metaphysics.  Her friend, a certified hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner who appears at "Cosmic Conventions" doesn't really believe in that sort of thing.  However, if this 100% halide-free water with added boron can remove the halides from the brain, then Alzheimer's and other dementias can possibly be prevented, and IQ can be restored to what it once was.  "The dumbing down" of the populace coincides with the fluoridation of water, so I do see something in decalcification if I can find enough research to show that boron supplementation will do this.

Now, what would happen if borax was added to a compost bin?  Would it increase the boron content of our crops?

I went to the spring with two others this morning and retrieved 9 gallons of water.  It is crystal clear, and it came out of the rock formation at a temperature that would have caused hypothermia if it was a pool.

Off to my friend's lab to have it tested, and the results came back showing that this water is about as pure as it can get, much purer than an average well.  I don't know everything that this report shows, like the conductivity, but I was told this was about as good as you can drink without distilling and then adding minerals back.

Here are the results:
Water Chemistry
    pH     7.8
    Dissolved Oxygen     11.19
    Conductivity     160.5 uS/L
    Temperature     13.8
    Residual Chlorine     0
    Copper     0
    Phenols     0
    MBAS     0
    Fluoride     0
    Ammonia-Nitrogen     0.03
    Ferrous Iron     0.04
    Total Iron     0.09
    Ferric Iron     0.05

The conductivity (EC or electrical conductivity) is nice. Shows there are some dissolved minerals without being highly aggressive or corrosive on the plumbing. Did you collect a sterile container for total coliform bacteria? Or is it routinely tested? Do you know what the lady was referencing by "99+% pure"?