Water Source Infiltrator

I water my bottom garden with a gravity fed siphon from the creek above. I mentioned it in a previous post. It had some serious drawbacks though. When the creek was muddy, the sediment would clog up the line, small leaves and twigs would get in, or the creek level changed and the siphon sucked air and ran out.... Many kinds of problems.

So I decided to make a filtered infiltrator for the supply and hopefully even it out.
A few weeks previously I had stretched a piece of conduit from the "rapids" to the bank just below. I then put a little children's bucket in a hole and had water spilling directly into it. But this had the same problems- sand and silt, leaves and trash, and that was when the whole upstream intake didn't clog up and let the bucket run dry.

So I re-thought out the problem, and came up with a solution (I hope). I took a piece of PVC drainage pipe about the same diameter as the conduit (about 90mm diameter), and began to drill holes in it. Many, many, many holes in a staggered pattern. Finally I had enough. So I drilled some more to be really sure. Then I put a plastic close weave mesh bag over the pipe, and connected it to the conduit. Step one was complete, and the water was flowing OK.

Then I built a quick and dirty sandbag dam- only about 10cm high. But that was enough to fully submerge the infiltrator.
Since then, the water has been flowing OK, even though the bag has picked up some grime on it.