My pond is a very, very, very small pond...
In semi-desert southeast New Mexico, we sometimes have enough rain for frogs/toads to come out and breed -- but the water often doesn’t last long enough for the tadpoles to develop.*** (I think the adults are frogs, but I’m not sure.) When I first discovered tadpoles on my land I started helping, first by using a hose to maintain a large puddle beside the barn, then deepening the puddle and making a wall around it, and finally by making a permanent (although very small) pond. This is the story of the journey from puddle to pond. I’ve put in dates, as best I can recreate them, but it was always (and still is) a work in progress. Like, one year the puddle was sufficient, then another year I deepened it a little, then another year built walls to deepen it more, later added stepping-stones. Then I decided a different location would be better, and went through the gradual improvements again -- first making the natural puddle deeper, then walls, then deeper with better walls, and finally a permanent, actual pond. The development was complicated by the fact that we don’t get enough rain for tadpoles every year; there may be two to four years between tadpole broods, and I generally made the ‘improvements’ during the wet years, just slapping things together as part of the normal upkeep around the place and not posting about it. So my memory is foggy -- the changes just didn’t stand out -- and many of the dates may well be inaccurate by two or three years on either side. But it gives you an idea...
***Ahem... I’ve just discovered that that assumption may be wrong. After all our rain, my neighbor had a big puddle between his house and livestock pasture. He told me it had tadpoles in it, and I went out a couple of evenings to collect them and transfer them to my pond. The last time (a week ago) I still didn’t get them all, but there was enough water to hold them for two or three more days. I went out two evenings later and there wasn’t one single tadpole in the puddle... but I did see a couple of teeny tiny froglets or toadlets hopping around the edges. Meanwhile, all the taddies in my pond are still taddies -- though I have seen one or two toadlets/froglets. So maybe they develop faster when the water is diminishing? And maybe I’ve actually hindered Mother Nature by making a pond? Oh, well, they’ll change eventually, and I like my pond; I’m not going to fill it in.***
Back to our story --
I’ve mentioned my ‘pond’ so many times over the years, always promising a post about it ‘one of these days’. Well, today’s the day. I’ve been working on this for about three weeks -- describing the alt-text for all the pictures required time and a lot of trying to formulate the right words to explain each picture, and I’m revising The Old Guard transcript in another document, and get sucked in by that. Today’s just the day you get to see the finished product.
Cut to the end first -- it’s 8 feet long on 3 sides, about 10 feet on the fourth, and 15 inches (38 cm) deep when it’s full to the top. It doesn’t have fish or plants; fish would eat tadpoles when they happen. I’ve considered planting a water-lily, but I know they can take over unless managed; maybe someday I’ll decide I’m willing to undertake the bother.
But getting to that had a lot of interim steps, and I’ve had to go back in LJ to try to reconstruct them all. I posted about some of the interim steps at the time, but often I just did something while planning to post about it, but never did. As best I can figure, it all began the summer of 2003, and... well, it’s not finished; I’m still making improvements, but it got to a permanent state in the summer of 2018.
Let’s set the scene first. My horses were as ‘free range’ as they could be on 4 acres. (I have 4.83 acres. My house is at the back of the 1st acre, and the land between the house and the road is left mostly natural for wildlife -- about 300 by 165 feet.) The barn is very basic -- corrugated metal, a run-in shed for the horses attached to covered hay-storage. Here’s an outline:
And this is a picture of the horses from June, 2005. I usually put the hay against the back wall, so that it wouldn’t get shoved out into the dirt as they ate, but I put it at the front this day so I could get good pics.
Notice that the walls are open at the top; that was deliberate to allow free air circulation. When we build it, my dad kept saying, “Are you sure you want that open?” I was sure; in the semi-desert where I live, a 3-sided metal box with a two-foot opening at the top is 15 - 20 degrees cooler than a 3-sided metal box with walls to the roof (my garage), but the walls are high enough to give the horses shelter from the cold winter winds. And yes -- the dirt floor is carpeted -- a sturdy, very short nap, commercial style, nailed to the bottom wooden crosspieces between the studs. I scavenged the first carpet from the used discard pile behind a carpet store; it lasted 10 - 12 years before I had to replace it. By then I could afford to buy new. It seems strange, but it prevented the dirt floor being trodden away, and provided firmer footing if the ground was wet from rain. (At the time, rubber stall-mats were a new thing; no place in town sold them, and I probably couldn’t have afforded them anyway.) The open door leads to the hay storage. The white paper on the door is printed feeding instructions for whoever I could get to feed when I had to be out of town. Dad and I built the barn in 1984; it’s showing its age.
Here the horses are sleeping, April 2007. I include it to show both parts of the barn. At one time I put gutters on the edges of the roof, to lead the rainwater away from the barn and direct it to the trees. But I wasn’t very good at it... by this time they were falling apart and/or falling off.
The open wall faces east, because bad weather usually comes from the west. But really bad weather often comes from the east, which I didn’t know at the time I decided on its orientation. In those cases I had to feed the horses on the west side, in a teeny tiny area under a roof overhang; you can see that in the next picture.
I had wanted to build the barn on the west side of my property, but that area was very rocky, with too much caliche to dig trenches to pour footings for the wall-studs. Unfortunately, there’s a very gradual slope from west side to east side -- a matter of maybe three or four inches -- but enough for the rain to pool on the east side. After years of the horses walking around, wearing down the ground, and the edges of the worn ground banking up along the fence-line, a really heavy rain created a very shallow lake of water around the barn -- as demonstrated by this picture from June 2009:
Look at that mess! The horses didn’t mind slopping through the water, but if the rain came from the east, the floor of the run-in area would be filled with large puddles. Sometimes I could sweep it out enough to throw down the hay, sometimes not. When I realized I needed an alternate feeding space (years before this, I don’t remember when, and at the time I only had one horse), I put down scrap lumber around the area by the ‘back door’ with the roof overhang -- at both side and the out from the door, drove stakes to hold them in place, filled in the low areas to raise it about 1-1/2 inches above the surrounding ground, and covered it with another scavenged carpet. It’s tiny -- about 6 x 10 feet, compared to 12 x 20 feet for each half of the barn (total 12 x 20) -- but gave one horse a dryer/warmer spot to eat if the bad weather was coming from the east. For two horses it was pretty cramped -- but animals, like people, can learn to ‘make do’ when necessary. The area to the right of the horses was already hollowed out from falling water; I used some of the dirt from that area to fill in under the roof -- which of course made it deeper, which is where I started making my first ‘big’ tadpole puddle.
In the summer of 2003, one evening I got about 2 inches rain in two hours. (Neither town -- I’m 12 miles from each -- even got wet.) Half an hour after the rain stopped, the croaking of the frogs (or toads) was so loud that I could hear it inside the house, over the sound of the TV. Three or four days later, I noticed something squiggling in one of the two large puddles remaining. Closer inspection showed -- TADPOLES! WOW!!! I hadn’t seen tadpoles since I was a kid, in a much moister part of the country. But -- the puddles would certainly dry out before the taddies (affectionate shorter form learned from my Aussie friend Jess Riley) matured, and I wanted to give them a fighting chance.
First I dug them a miniature pond -- about bathtub sized, though only 6 inches deep -- right next to the fence between my back yard and the barnyard (where my hose could reach, so I could keep it filled) and moved them all there -- scooped them up with an old measuring cup and transferred them in a bucket. But it didn’t work too well; the water got so skuzzy and muddy that I couldn’t even see them. Also, the horses kept breaking down the ‘banks’ as they investigated. (People who don’t live with horses don’t realize that, if they feel safe and secure, they’re as curious as cats. That’s a story for another day.) So a week or so later I bought a plastic child’s wading pool and put them in there. Mistake -- I didn’t know then that those plastic pools are infused with algae-inhibitor chemicals. It slowed their growth; they took forever to develop. Eventually, I moved the taddies into four 10-gallon Rubbermaid ‘rough totes’ that I could dump the water periodically and clean out the worst of the scuzz. They developed faster after that, and were adult -- although tiny toads/frogs before autumn. (BTW, that price -- about $15 per tote -- is ridiculous. At the time, I could get them on sale for $5 each at Kmart.)
As I said, I don’t get tadpoles every year. I have short posts talking about them from August ‘05 and August ‘06. Somewhere along the line, I quit putting them in containers; I decided it was easier to just get a long hose that would reach the backside of the barn so I could keep it filled. So if tadpoles showed up, I still had to catch them from all over the barnyard and put them in that particular puddle, but it was out of the way of the horses’ (and my) traffic pattern. It was very shallow -- two or three inches -- and if I visited my parents for a weekend, the neighbor sometimes didn’t understand how much water to add when they fed the horses; I once came home from a long weekend and the taddies were all crowded into a space the size of a serving platter; if I’d been gone another day, they’d have died.
So by June of 2009, I was working to enlarge that puddle and make it deeper to hold more water for longer.
This is the backside (west side) of the barn, next to the ‘really bad weather’ feeding area; you can see the 4x4 I used at that end to hold the fill-dirt. This picture is from June ’09; you can see how I’ve scraped up the wet mud to make higher walls. I made a post about moving the taddies from the ‘small puddle’ (south of the barn) to the ‘big puddle’ (this one). Of course, this one was bigger because I made it so. I should have made the south puddle bigger (where my pond is now), but hindsight is 20/20.
By June 2012, I was working to make it even bigger, with better walls. I don’t remember why it took 3 years, but it’s likely that I didn’t get tadpoles in 2010 and 2011; I have no posts about them.
It looks like I did this after a batch of tadpoles had already developed, to be ready for the next time. (There would not be so much wet mud otherwise.) As you can see, I used various lumber I had lying around and some big stones to make the extra walls, and scraped the mud up against the lumber and on the other side to cut down on water seepage. On the far side, next to the little white shed, you can see the tiny ‘east-bad-weather feeding area’, also carpeted like the main floor of the run-in shed.
I made a retrospective post about it the following year. I really went all out --
On the west side of the barn, two sides were already solid -- the side of the barn, and a 4x4 piece of lumber, that I used to hold an extended raised area for the horses to stand on dry land when we have so much water. So I dragged a couple more 4x4s into place for the other two sides, and scraped up the interior dirt to [a] level the ground and [b] bank it against the edges so the water wouldn’t seep out. Then I put 5, 2-inch cement blocks as a pathway into the middle (to let me collect tadpoles without sinking in the mud) and ‘decorated’ the area with a tasteful arrangement of large rocks to promote algae growth and give the taddies places to cluster or swarm or whatever they do. Finished it off by driving T-posts at the corners and blocking it off with bright yellow twine from old hay-bales. Lady thinks walking through that area is a short-cut, and she’s right -- it saves her maybe 4 steps as she heads to the other side of the barn. But those short-cuts caused lots of problems in previous years with keeping the tadpoles safe; the deep holes of footprints would push up the edges of the mud, and some taddies would get trapped in a too small area when evaporation and/or seepage lowered the water-level. Or she’d create a gap in the edge, the water would start draining out, and I’d have to fix it, then chase tadpoles in puddles and put them back in the main pool. I was always trying to deepen the pool, raise the edges, connect the deep holes to each other so taddies were free to move around... it was a real hassle. I’m pleased to report that all the effort I expended last summer has paid off -- all I’ve had to do this year is pull out the weeds (easy when the roots are water-soaked) and turn on the hose once a day when I feed the horses. (There’s more rambling at that link, if you’re interested.)
Eventually I realized that the west side of the barn was not an ideal spot -- it’s mostly in shade until noon, which slows the taddie development. I originally put it there to be ‘out of the way’ of the horses’ travel pattern as they walked south of the barn. But the taddies always ‘sprouted’ in the south puddle, and I had to move them to the west side -- a major chore -- and, if the south area was really sloppy/muddy, the horses would walk around it to stay on firmer ground anyway. Somewhere between 2013 to 2015, I decided to make a south pond and hopefully save myself some work in subsequent years.
This picture is from Jan 2010, to show you the area. Notice that the ground where the horses are standing is a tiny bit -- 3 - 4 inches -- higher than the ground in front of them. I learned early -- well, a couple of years after I got the first horse and she was the only one -- that that was a prime spot in cold weather. It’s a south-facing wall, so it collects and reflects the sun, and is protected from north winds. It also allows the horse(s) to keep an eye out while waiting for me to come deliver supper, which is super important as far as they’re concerned. When I realized that [a] the horse(s) would stand there consistently and [b] the dirt was being worn down, I threw a piece of scavenged carpet there, too. It’s a little hollowed out -- you can see a bit of a ‘hump’ at the front edge -- but it is above the rest of the area. It’s about 7 or 8 feet wide from the barn wall, and I used the edge of the carpet as the line for the ‘back wall’ of the pond. You can see a T-post sticking up at the what is now the front left corner of the pond. I hadn’t started making it yet, but maybe I was thinking about it. Or maybe I drove the post there to hang fly-trap bags on. I simply don’t remember.
I was still using the west pool in 2012, so I probably didn’t start the south pool until 2014 or 2015. I don’t remember the year, but I do remember that the sequence pretty much followed the sequence of developing the west pool. I drove T-posts at the corners, put baling twine around them to prevent the horses walking through, and dug down 2 or 3 inches. The dirt there was easy shoveling -- years of collecting rainwater, and the caliche layer is 15 inches down. That 2 or 3 inches, with the dirt piled around the edges, was enough for the tadpoles. Then the neighbor’s ducks discovered it, and I felt sorry for them just sitting in the water and not able to swim, so I dug it a little deeper. Then the neighbor’s dog (a Great Pyrenees) discovered it and liked to play in it, so I dug it a little deeper. Starting summer of 2017, I was spending week-on, week-off in Clovis (trading with my sis) to help my parents; the water had to last the whole week I was gone. It was still a dirt pond that lost water through seepage and, again, when the neighbors fed the horses while I was gone, they weren’t good about keeping the water sources topped off. So I dug still deeper that summer (shoveled wet mud the weeks I was home, then filled it before I left for the Clovis weeks) Finally, in 2018, I decided to make it a true pond, with a liner to prevent seepage and let the water last longer.
Since I already had the T-posts in place, I laid an 8-foot 2x4 on the ground between each set -- east, south, west -- tied them to the base of the T-posts so they wouldn’t move, and used them as a guide for the edges. Then I started digging. It was pretty easy -- half-done already from years of making it “just a little deeper” -- and the dirt was soft from years of being wet. (And when it got too hard, I put in a couple of inches of water at the end of the digging, let it soak in overnight, then dug up all that the next day. I wasn’t sure how deep I would go... but then I hit a solid layer of caliche 15 inches down. I know from experience that it’s possible to break the caliche up and go deeper... but I was making a tadpole/duck pool, not a swimming pool; 15 inches was sufficient. And that layer of caliche was remarkably level, so I deemed it good enough.
Ah, now I remember! How did I keep water for all the animals while I was digging the pond, you ask? The horses had their 150-gallon stock tank (an upgrade from a recycled bathtub). I had brought home my mom’s old 75-gallon stock tank; I put it out by the pond, with cement blocks beside it forming steps for the smaller animals (cats, chickens) to reach. And earlier that year -- or maybe the year before, I don’t remember -- I had installed a 30-gallon tub by the garage and a 15-gallon tub on my porch. (I’ll show you later.) All of those were big enough to only need filling once while I was spending a week in Clovis, and I had hoses leading directly to the two stock-tanks, so it was easy for the folks who were feeding the horses to keep enough water available.
So the developing pond was dry for.. May and June at least, part of July? Remember, I could only work on it every-other-week. And remember the dimensions -- 8 feet on 3 sides, 10 feet on the side closest to the barn, 15 inches deep... that’s a lot of dirt to shovel, even though I was about one-third of the way down. But I was doing pretty good -- had the south and north sides straight down from the edges to the caliche layer, and the middle was clear. I was working on clearing the east and west sides, but every day kept looking like it would soon rain cats and dogs -- or tadpoles! -- and I wanted it finished in time for tadpole season. I knew there was a man down the road (literally, about 3/4th mile from me) who had a backhoe; I called around till I found someone who knew his name and number and called to hire him to finish the east and west sides. He came that evening after his regular work was finished, took care of all the rest of the dirt in about 15 minutes, and wouldn’t take payment. I think he was impressed by how much I had already dug and took pity on me, but he said that tiny job just wasn’t worth charging for.
I had already bought a 12 x 15-foot (I think) pond liner -- thick, heavy, plasticized fabric -- from Lowe’s home improvement. I opened it and read the instructions, part of which were to put a layer of sand on the bottom of the pond to help prevent punctures. Oi vey! I could get sand... but that would mean more days of shoveling and trying to get it level. BUT! Remember the scavenged carpet I put down in various places? My friend Nancy knew about that. Several years before this, her husband had moved his business to a new location. They had to pull up the old carpet and lay down new before they opened; Nancy had called me and asked if I wanted any of the old carpet. I said, “Sure!” even though I didn’t need it at the time; when you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you keep a lot of things that ‘might come in handy someday’. So I had a bunch of rolls of 2-foot-wide carpet strips stored in the barn. Ah-HA! That would pad the bottom nicely.
The next morning I unfolded the liner lengthwise and about a quarter of the width; the idea was to let it heat and soften and become more pliable in the sun while I put the carpet strips in the hole. But when I unfolded the liner, it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to maneuver it by myself. I get a lot of physical stuff done that surprises people, simply by being too stubborn to quit, but this was so big and so heavy... I might have managed by myself in about 4 hours (which the Laws of Murphy would extend to 6 hours). But I figured the initial positioning would take only 15-20 minutes if I had help, so I called Nancy and asked if she could come give me hand in a couple of hours. During that time, I laid down the carpet strips along the bottom and up the sides -- two layers, one east-west, one north-south, for extra padding. When Nancy came I was almost finished; she carried a couple of rolls from the barn while did the scut-work in the hole. It took us about 15 minutes to get the liner properly positioned over, and dipping into, the hole. We secured the corners with scattered caliche rocks so it wouldn’t flap around while I continued working, then she went back to town for a scheduled lunch-date with friends.
It took me a few more hours to smooth (mostly; there are some wrinkles) the liner along the floor, snug it against the walls, and hold it down at the edges with lines of caliche rocks. Then I turned the hose on... it looked so pretty, and it was fun to wade in the cool water; I was pretty hot and sweaty by then. But it takes a long time to fill a 900-gallon pond. (I calculated the cubic area and converted to gallons a couple of years ago. Don’t know how accurate I am, but I thank we can safely say ‘more than 700 and less than 1200 gallons’.) It’s enough to provide water for up to two weeks, and cats can still reach the water level from the rim. It would probably last another month, but they’d have to go down the access points to reach the water level.
BTW -- after my hurry to finish the pond, we never did get a big ‘tadpole rain’ that year. This year -- 3 years later -- is my first batch of tadpoles in the pond.
But I wasn’t done yet! I wanted/needed a spillover birdbath in the center, and access points for small animals to reach the water if the water dipped too low.
Birdbath first. I had already searched all over the net for a birdbath that was designed to sit in water, and spill over into the water source -- keep that water circulating and disturbed, which makes it unattractive for mosquitos to lay in it. But birdbaths are, by definition, designed to keep the water contained. Hmm... Okay, I’ve long subscribed to the code of the Little Red Hen -- “I’ll do it myself.” I scrounged in the garage and the storage shed to see what I might have. Ah-HA! I had two large -- about 18 inches across -- plastic planter-saucers. A few years before, I filled them daily to feed the feral cats (and skunks, and chickens, and my resident thrasher...). But by this time, those were no longer suitable, since I was away for a week at a time. I now had five big pet food ‘gravity feeders’ that each hold 16 pounds of cat food. Since the saucers were no longer used as food bowls, one would be ideal as a birdbath -- plenty of room around the rim for multiple birds to perch, and shallow enough for the birds to splash around.
Setting it up wasn’t difficult -- just time-consuming. I started with two big cement blocks. I laid one on its side on the floor of the pond, and moved it around until it had solid support -- no rocking on the somewhat uneven floor. It wasn’t exactly in the middle of the pond as I’d hoped, but good enough. I needed the birdbath far enough from the edge that, if the wind was strong enough to blow water over the ‘wrong’ side, it wouldn’t fall on the ground and eventually drain the pond. (A friend of mine has a little homemade waterfall at the edge of her little outdoor fishpool, and she has to turn it off when it’s very windy, because it starts emptying her pool.)
The second block stood upright on the first one, like this: _|_ and the planter-saucer sat on top of that. I used three very short -- about 1/4th inch, as narrow as I could cut -- pieces of PVC pipe under one side so the water would spill over the ‘low’ side, instead of just dripping all around. Then I ran some stiff wire through the top hole of the block and hooked it over the rim of the saucer on each side, so it wouldn’t be picked up and tossed aside by a strong wind. Then I dropped a fountain pump in the pond and ran a plastic tube to the saucer to deliver the water; tied the tube to a rock, and the rock to one of the wire hooks to hold the tube in place. Plugged it in and... it worked!
Here’s the original plastic-saucer birdbath:
Buuuut... there were a few minor problems. After a few days in the hot sun, and the weight of the water where the saucer wasn’t supported by the block, it started to droop; I suspected it would eventually fold completely down. And only half of the water fell straight down to the pond; the rest trickled down the side of the saucer, ran along the bottom, then trickled down the cement block. I needed something better.
One day when I was walking through the garden center at Lowe’s, I realized I could use the clay planter-saucers. They weren’t as big as the plastic saucer -- about 16 inches -- but they don’t go out of style; if it breaks, I can easily obtain another. (I’d run in to that problem when I tried to buy more of the same plastic planter-saucer a couple of years after I bought the first two. They were nowhere to be found.)
The solution to the water-dripping problem was much more primitive. I grabbed an empty gallon vinegar jug (I use vinegar in the rinse for my laundry and dishwasher) and made a ‘water chute’ -- cut out the bottom and one side -- and tucked it between the block and the saucer, so the spilling water would land on the plastic, then be directed outward to fall straight down to the water.
Here’s the clay saucer, with a few birds perched on it, from November 2018. You can see the tube from the pump to the saucer. Look through the hole in the block -- that’s the backside of the water-chute, with the water falling strongly from it.
And a direct view of the vinegar-jug water-chute in action:
Notice the cement blocks to make stairsteps at the top right edge; that’s the middle of the south side. They let me get in and out of the pond easily -- 15 inches is just too big a step for my short legs -- and let the animals get closer to the water if the level is dropping. Also notice the white rock sticking out of the water at the corner at the top left of the picture. That’s one caliche rock -- and it’s not the largest. I have a rock like that at three corners, and in the middle of the east and west sides, and a slanted solid cement block at the fourth corner. They all provide access for small animals or insects to get close to the water without falling in -- seven separate access points in that tiny pond. And when the taddies turn into frogs/toads, that gives them a way out of the pond. The rocks also collect a layer of algae, so the taddies can feed; I go out there now and there are dozens crowding at each rock, and the cement blocks, munching on the algae.
(Note: this was a week earlier than the current posting. Not nearly so many, now.)
I have one caliche rock that’s huge -- easily reaches from the floor of the pond to above the edge on a slant. (Had to ask my neighbor’s help to move it.) The others aren’t quite so big, and I originally propped them up with cement blocks underneath -- but that made it difficult to net-scoop mud out of the pond. A couple of weeks ago, I figured out a better method -- tied baling twine around the bottom of each stone, then lifted it to the edge of the pond and used the extra length to tie around a T-post to hold it in place at the corners. At the sides, I drove a nail into the wood 2 x 4 under the liner, and tied the baling twine to that. It works! And now it’s a lot easier to net-scoop out the mud... or it will be when the taddies are gone.
What about winter, you (probably don’t) ask? I put a stock-tank heater in the pond; it keeps the water ice-free and flowing. (Usually. The really heavy 3-day freeze this past winter almost defeated it; there was ice on the pond, but the water was still liquid underneath and kept the birdbath working. I’ve bought another heater to put in the pond at the same time if we get that severe cold again; theoretically, two should do the trick.) But my water-chute doesn’t channel all the water. Some drips out around the edge, in small enough amounts that the cold can overcome the warmth of the water (only 40F, 4.5C) and a big fat icicle forms next to the upright block, like so:
And here’s the not-yet-finished-but-functional pond from August, 2018. There are two of the neighbor’s ducks enjoying a swim, and several chickens coming for a drink. That’s the first, plastic birdbath, before I switched to clay and added the water-chute.
The upside-down orange bucket on the right T-post keeps rain (when it happens) off the connection between the extension cord and the fountain-pump cord. Since then, I’ve strung a braided rope from that post diagonally above the pond to the back left post; the birds sometimes like to perch on it while they decide whether it’s safe to get a drink. That rope interfered with the rain-protection, so I moved the power cords to the front left post and covered them with a feedbag, as can been seen in the pictures in this post. (That’s the back-left post, not the front-left, but the idea is the same.)
But wait! There’s more!
Even though I’ve tried to be accurate about the fits and starts and gradual improvements, there are a few I haven’t touched on, yet. Sometimes a pre-fixit can be too thorough...
Everything I know knew about pumps told me they had to be kept clean, with the intake sides clear. And the fountain pump would be sitting in a pond, and we get a lot of blowing dirt, which hits the water, settles, and forms mud on the bottom. Maybe I could design a filter to [a] keep it above the muddy floor of the pond and [b] keep out other floating debris. I put on my thinking cap, and came up with this --
You’re looking down into a 5-gallon plastic bucket that has a tight-fitting lid. I drilled a bunch of holes in the sides, and wrapped the sides with two layers of air-conditioning filter to keep out the debris and mud. Those are caliche rocks in the bottom, to [a] weight the bucket so it won’t float and [b] lift the pump above mud level. The idea was that, with the lid on, the pump would only have ‘clean’ filtered water, so I wouldn’t have to clean it. I figured I could lift the bucket out of the pond once in a while, hose the mud/algae off the AC filters, then put it back. Sounds simple, right? Actually, it was a pain in the butt, and the filters often got so clogged that the pump couldn’t draw enough water. I finally gave up on that, ditched the bucket-filter, and just stapled a mesh filter around the pump. They’re cheap; when they got grody and/or clogged, I just cut one off and put on a new one. But the pump inside the filter was still getting filled with algae and grit. I finally realized it was easier to ignore the filter altogether. I simply go out with an old toothbrush every week or 10 days, and use that to clean the intake ports -- much easier, and far less time consuming. Just this year I bought a small wire basket, turned it upside-down, and tied the pump to that. The basket keeps the pump about 5 inches above the pond floor, so it doesn’t draw as much dirt.
Notice how flat the caliche rocks are. A lot of caliche is rounded and bulky, like a regular fist-shaped stone, but much of it is amazingly flat. That’s the kind of rocks I have as access-points in the corners -- except they’re 14 - 16 inches long, and the biggest is about 20 inches; it’s a monster.
That’s all for the pond. But as I’ve mentioned, I keep other water sources available. For years it was a collection of dishpans and/or litter boxes (bought new, not reused) -- 5 or 6 at a time, scattered around in the garage, next to the garage, and on my porch. When I was home all the time, I could make sure they were filled, but when I started spending so much time in Clovis, they often went dry and the neighbors didn’t notice. A year or so before I started the final push toward completing the pond, I changed from multiple small pans to two big tubs --
a 15-gallon tub in a corner of my porch --
and a 30-gallon tub next to the garage --
In both pictures you can see -- [a] I put up various arrangements of cement blocks for smaller animals to reach the water, as well as [b] a slanted block into the water for small animals to brace their paws against, or insects to crawl down to the water. I also [c] built a PVC support to hold the water-tubing above the tub, so the water would fall instead of just swirl around. If you look closely, the white fuzzy mass in the bottom of the 15-gallon tub is the [d] pump wrapped in a fabric-screen filter. (As I said, I no longer do that; I just clean the intake ports with an old toothbrush when necessary.) You can kind of see it in the 30-gallon tub, but it’s mostly hidden by the falling water. That red-black circle in the 30-gallon tub is the top of [e] the top of my stock-tank heater. This past winter I bought a bird-bath heater for the 15-gallon tank. Before that, I just unplugged the pump at night and plugged it in again when the temp got above freezing -- which is most winter days around here.
When I first put these together, I was very disappointed that the water falling straight down from the tubing made almost no disturbance when it hit the water -- no ripples, no ‘falling water’ sound. I needed to diffuse the water somehow -- break it up to make ripples and a nice sound. I looked around and hit on an empty vinegar-jug. (This was before the pond; having done this is probably what gave me the idea for the pond water-chute.) I cut a little flap, bent it, and taped it to the PVC support. Then the water hit it, was spread, and created the ripples and sound I wanted. Here’s a closeup --
Ah... and there you can see the fuzzy mass of filter-wrapped pump on the bottom
And finally, here’s a picture of bees using the cement block to access the water.
I’ve also seen bees clustered on the edge of the birdbath in the pond... but not this year. I haven’t seen many bees since my picture of them on the hummingbird feeder on Dec. 26th -- a few here and there on all the wildflowers that are growing after the rains, but not the dozens I should see/hear every time I go near the flowers. I rather suspect that the local hive -- wherever it’s hidden -- didn’t survive the winter; it’s very sad. I like bees, as long I don’t get stung. I’ll just have to hope that their numbers recover by later this summer.
Finally, just for completion -- I’ve been feeding my taddies goldfish flakes once a day. I know they can eat algae, but there were so many -- a week ago, the surface of the pond was teeming with little black wiggly bodies, 200 - 300 at least. I just came in from the ‘evening feed’, and the numbers are down by about 75% -- I see maybe 50. When I looked closer, I saw that most of them had back legs sprouted (they always come first), and about half are also sprouting front legs. And I saw two teeny-tiny froglets/toadlets on my cement steps. (The others have probably dispersed; there’s no way I’ll ever see them in the knee- to waist-high weeds.) So maybe I haven’t interfered with Mother Nature too much after all, and they’ll turn when they’re ready to turn regardless of how deep the water is. 😊
And finally, just because I'm curious -- this post is 7,007 words. *shakes head ruefully* About 30% of my posted fic has a smaller word-count. I do like to ramble, don't I? 😉
(And now, 7,040. )
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