The Pond

I have designated this week "catch up" week on the farm blog.  Farming has been rolling right along this spring (for a change).  Last year we were still pulling up old plastic mulch in late June.  Right now the fields are completely plowed and disked and the rototiller was suppose to be in action today, but I haven't found Mike yet to ask him today's details of what happened on the farm while I was at work in town.  Although it is getting close to 8pm, he is still in the fields working.  That is farming this time of year.

Since there is so much different stuff to catch up on, I've decided to tackle one subject at a time to make it easier to check back in the archives from year to year and because if I put too much in one blog, well, it's just too many words and I have trouble keeping things on track as it is.

This is how bad the "keeping on track" has become.  Two days ago I started writing this first "catch up" blog about the pond.  I've wanted a pond for a long time.  Every nature lover out there would surely agree that a pond adds a richness to the landscape.  Food and water perpetuate life and if you have both then you are surely rich.  All this deep thinking got me remembering my college days when I used to pull out my copy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden and would read and dream about a life outside of the city.  Our farm's new little 1/2 acre pond is a puddle compared to Walden Pond, but for me it takes me back to my youth when I was learning to love and embrace the natural world.  It has been many many years since I picked up and read from Walden, and so two days ago when I started writing this blog, I thought "I bet I can find a nice quote from the book to include in the blog about our new pond".  Jumping back into the present, I got online and took to looking through the Wikiquote pages on Walden. As I was reading, I was finding out that Mr. Thoreau had some not so nice things to say about farmers.  Well, at least I don't think they were very nice.  He chastised farmers for only caring about what money their crops could bring them and not caring about how their farm fit into the natural world.  Kind of ticked me off a bit since I now live on a farm and while making money is part of it, I care very deeply for nature.  All of this led me to continue reading more from Walden and before I knew it, I had to leave for an evening meeting.  End of writing session.  And this is why I never seem to get blog posts written these days and I swear it is getting worse as I get older.

But as much as Mr. Thoreau's views of farmers got me a bit agitated, I still do appreciate his writing and what he was trying to accomplish.  So it is appropriate that I include one of his quotes to start my pond blog.

“A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”   Henry David Thoreau

Since the last time I blogged, the pond has been both dug and filled.  The two bulldozers worked in tandem and it was fun watching how efficient the guys were at piling up the dirt.

Seems like it was no time at all until the dozers were disappearing deeper and deeper into the earth.

In the end, we had a big hole in the east end of our meadow.

The next step was to take full advantage of several days in a row of rain, a nicely flowing Peters Creek, a big diesel powered pump and lots of hose.  A couple days of running the pump 24/7 and our big hole was now officially a pond.

The big pump.

The pond. Ta da!

And since this is an irrigation project first and foremost, Mike and the irrigation guy are now in the process of getting all that equipment set up.  The sand filters are up and we are waiting on the irrigation guy to return with some missing parts.

For my part in all of this, evenings such as the ones in the picture below are why I have always wanted a pond.