Winter to Spring

One of the best parts of living on a farm is being exquistely immersed in the changing seasons.  When I lived in the city, I never paid much attention to the outdoors especially in cold wet weather except when a weekend outing would take me to the woods.  During the week if it were rainy or cold, the outdoors was a place to dash through from my car to the classroom or from work to the car and then back into the house.  But now here on the farm, I am outside much more often.  Even though in the coldest months the chickens live in the shelter of the barn, I am still outside carrying water and feed between buildings and hauling manure to the compost pile as needed.  Being outdoors every single day I get to see the seasons change day by day.  At times the changes are nearly imperceptible, but then there is March. This year it seems as though winter does not want to leave but as the days get longer and longer, there is no choice in the matter.  Winter ends as spring arrives.  Because each year is just a little different than the last, I thought I would go through  this year's transition.  We are probably a good week behind last year and several weeks behind 2012 the year of the early spring and summer drought.  

So here goes the chronicle of winter to spring 2015:

Looking back through my pictures, I must have sensed a change was coming because on March 8th I took a picture of Peters Creek from the vantage of the culvert that runs underneath the tractor road that goes to the field.  A thin strip of open water can be seen where there once was only snow.  At this point we still had about 2 feet of snow on the ground.

On March 9th, the sun was shining and a small bit of grass started showing on the path I walked every day from the driveway to the barns.  

The opening to Peters Creek was a little wider.

By March 11th, the sun was working as hard as it could against the reflective powers of the snow.  Peters Creek opens up a bit more.  On March 12th, the redwing blackbirds returned to the farm.

Three days later on March 14th, the snow melt was happening more quickly now.  We were fortunate to have no torrential rain to add to the snow melt.  The snow melt was enough to make Peters Creek spill out of its banks and flood the bottom land.  Although this picture is taken from the exact same spot as all the others, it almost doesn't look like the same creek.

Also on March 14th, there were large enough patches of grass showing up in the yard that the chickens actually wanted to venture out of the barn.  They spent a little over 2 months straight locked up in the barn this winter thanks to a persistent ground cover of snow up over their heads.

By March 21st, the farm pond was still frozen solid, but I found the first evidence that groundhogs were waking up from their winter slumber underground. The wild turkeys started to leave their wintering grounds across the road and showed up on the farm.  Right on cue, the turkey vultures returned on March 22nd.  Although they did not stop this year, I heard the swans pass by after dark on March 22nd.

On March 29th I heard the first woodcock singing its "peent" call in the pasture and on March 30th, the farm pond, although still covered in ice, had a rim of open water along its edge.  Last year the pond was completely ice free on this date.

On April 1st, the wild honey bee hives that live in the old chicken coop became active.  It was nice to know that both hives survived the winter.  Official "ice out" of the farm pond came on April 2nd.  That same day I heard the chorus frogs for the first time and on April 3rd they were joined by spring peepers.

The extreme cold of this past winter has made me hoping for an early spring but nature as always doesn't care what I want.  Even so, try as it might, winter cannot hold us in her grip forever.  The transition is underway.

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.