Today in a while there was a break in the rain, i was standing by the pond trying to figure out what to do with it. See we’ve been trying to empty it, so we can finish moving around a pile of dirt and rocks from the center, and put an water intake at the bottom. Unfortunately our little 50 gallons a minute pump just isn’t up to the task. We’ve run it 4 or 5 days, all day, and the water level has only gone down 8 inches. It doesn’t help that it’s been raining, replenishing the pond, but still, we’re not making much progress.
While standing there thinking about draining the pond, i saw a turtle swim up to the surface, take a breath of air, and swim back down in to the green water. I guess the turtle must have either been washed in to the pond from the creek during the winter floods, or walked over, it’s only about 100 feet to the creek. We’ve also noticed that there are some small fish in the pond, and the deer like to come down and drink out of it. Now, even if i could drain the pond, i’d feel bad about displacing the little ecology which has grown up.
We haven’t turned on the 4 inch pipe leading over from the creek to fill the pond, hopefully when we do it’ll keep the alge from growing to thick. We’ve set aside a shallow area for water plants, and plan to put the aforementioned water intake to recirculate the water. Who knows if it’ll work, it’s our first attempt at building a swimming pond of any size. We have a bunch of what my mom calls ‘pond silt’ which is supposed to prevent the water for seeping in to the surrounding ground, Without draining the pond we can only put it on the edges of the pond which are not covered by water.
I left the camera back in san francisco, but last fall i put some photos up on flickr of the pond. I also doubled the size of the garden building a nice solid fence. Most of the time i’m inside online, hoping that the solar panels are getting enough juice through the grey rainy sky to keep laptop and net connection running.
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