In the Merry Wet Month of May

In high contrast to last year's drought and heat wave, which was well underway in May, this spring has been long, cool, and wet. Perhaps at least partially due to the different weather, we notice many other differences in how the plant and animal populations are expressed. The later onset of warmer temperatures meant that I saw lots of flowering plants and trees that last year I missed by not arriving here on the farm until mid-April.

Whether through the action of squirrels or the whimsy of previous residents, there are patches of tame flowers in unexpected places away from the farmstead, for instance the bearded iris near Eye Chair, the day lilies along the dam and in the road ditch, and these daffodils on the far side of the pond.

This crabapple was festooned with blossoms, though a bit past its prime and beginning to leaf out by the time I made this photograph.

I'm not a skilled botanical taxonomist and so can only say that these looked up close like tiny bleeding heart flowers.

Here are some trillium amidst the dandelions in a sunny spot in the woods.

And – oh dear, that telephone camera doesn't work very well – a wild variety of violet.

The machine shed is flanked on each side by large forsythia bushes, brilliantly golden for about a week. This poor plant grew rapidly afterward, became top-heavy, and suffered a lot of damage in one of the fierce thunderstorms we've had in the past two months. We'll cut it back, and thin it out, and it should be all right again in a year or two. To the right is one of the red raspberry trellises, and in the background you can see the cider apple orchard.

More flowering trees.

At several locations throughout the woods appeared colonies of May apples like these. Once Frank B. identified them for me, I began to see them everywhere. At this time one could still walk easily through the woods but the undergrowth has become rank and impenetrable. Any excursion off the paths is now a steamy, sweaty, scratchy affair with a guarantee of discovering wood ticks afterward.

Lyme disease, carried by deer ticks and other kinds of ticks, is not a great concern in this area, unlike, say, many parts of Wisconsin. Deer ticks are tiny, pinhead-sized creatures, and I've yet to find anything to identify as such, but the wood ticks are very evident, visually and by their movements on one's skin. Squeamishness is pointless, but one does become hypersensitive to, for instance, the feel of arm hairs on sleeves: Was that something moving? The ticks don't settle down for about a day so we almost always find them before they've bitten, and then it's important to not let them escape or they'll climb the furniture and jump on you again!

The second and third week of May are when morel mushrooms tend to emerge, and I had luck enough to find a nice patch of these delicious fungi. Sautéed and in a cream sauce, served over small grilled steaks – oh, so good. Those we didn't eat fresh went into the dehydrator. Some people around here go crazy for morels and we saw classified ads from restauranteurs and others offering up to $60 a pound.

Diligent readers may recall that last fall we recovered a large corrugated metal pipe (CMP) culvert from the creek. It had evidently been placed as a creek crossing but being considerably undersized had washed out. We dragged it with the tractor to the other side of the farm where a tributary flows from The Narrows at the lane and the terraces in the observatory field above.

Re-establishing a crossing here is part of the larger plan to have tractor access to the entire farm without having to use the county road. We found some 6-inch diameter flexible plastic drain pipe just downstream, washed out like the CMP, and again obviously grossly undersized for the application. Good rule of thumb: the pipe area should be about the same as the stream cross-section!

This little stream is ephemeral, that is, it doesn't flow all the time. During a relatively dry spell, Alan used a spade to square and level the channel, then placed a load of gravel as bedding. He set two stout poles at an angle in the channel, then rolled the CMP over the edge where it rested against the poles. He then eased the poles out, lowering the culvert into place.

Next, more gravel to fill the gaps on either side, and the excavated soil on top. Et voilà.

It's barely wide enough for the tractor but didn't have to be. It's smoothed out since this photo was made and now looks a pretty darn professional installation.

The hillside that descends from the lane to the culvert crosses a line of seeps and we had to build a bit of roadway before we could complete the project.

Alan's first attempt to work in the project area was timed a little prematurely, before we realized we needed the roadway, and the tractor just slipped in the mud as he tried to ascend. Donna pulled him out with the pickup. Motive force!

Well, my goodness – I should have separated this post into chapters. Thank you for your forbearance, dear readers. Also in May, we spent an interesting Saturday morning in historic Kalona, about an hour away, at the annual exotic animal sale, alternating between the small and large animal auctions. Based on so-far-limited research at the auction cafes where we've eaten, it appears that the Methodist women make tastier pies than the Amish women (I know this will be controversial – please keep your comments civil).

And then, finally, the weather was warm enough and the ground dry enough to get into the gardens. This next photo shows the soil manufactory, which is to say the compost pile. We collected plenty of raw material over the past year but I was not diligent in the layering and turning operations. A lot of the material broke down pretty well and when screened produced a beautiful topsoil-like compost, just the kind of high organic content stuff we need to improve the tilth and fertility of the garden soil. But it hadn't been cooked (by microbial action) to a high enough temperature to kill the seeds it contained.

Everything I planted using this compost as bedding for seed came up with lots of cucurbits (melon, squash, etc.) and tomatoes, and I've been paying the price since, weeding on my hands and knees. Not to mention the purslane, as overwhelming as last year. More on the gardens in future posts...

Oh yes, the cider apples. Next post.

And the gnats. Ye gods, the gnats.

Fingers Crossed

A day after installing the new principal spillway for the dam that creates the pond, rains fell and there was nothing to do but wait for the water to rise and see if the repairs held. In this image you can see the old shoreline, just about dividing the beach into halves.

Here is the contraption: a five-inch diameter PVC pipe inserted about eight feet into the old CMP, with an elbow and a riser. The top of the riser is cut at a 45-degree angle for vortex prevention. If, when the spillway is in operation, a vortex or whirlpool forms on the water surface, the pipe flow will be decreased by the volume of air sucked down. We're all about efficiency around here – at least the two-thirds of us that are engineers.

The cage is intended to protect the spillway against impacts from floating debris and ice damage. We salvaged the chunk of hog panel from elsewhere on the property and fastened it to the small-diameter pipes, which in turn rest on steel posts driven into the pond bottom. The riser tips backward a bit because the CMP runs through the embankment at a slant and we used a 90-degree elbow joint.

As we inserted the long end of the PVC pipe into the CMP, we applied an expansive adhesive/sealant, the final bead of which you can see in the next image as the black-grey donut at the joint.

Early results were promising. Water rose up to the joint then over it and, putting my ear to the riser opening, I could hear nothing to indicate leakage. Water began to creep into the Isthmus, which had been dry since early last summer.

With some good help by Frank and Debbie, we took the next step in dam maintenance, moving the trees and brush we had felled on the downstream embankment into a pile and burning what we could not harvest as poles and logs. This image is looking north; the trees remaining on the slope are in the vicinity of the spillway outlet, so we're taking more care in felling the big ones, particularly so the valve stem of the drain won't be damaged.

We still have a fair amount to do, but considering the entire slope used to be covered with woody vegetation, as shown here looking the other direction, we made a good beginning.

Through the tangle of cut brush – the smaller stuff – is the drain valve stem adjacent to the principal spillway outlet. There's no shortage of work to do here!

Mechanical Means

It's a pretty big pond. After we pulled off the failed inlet and primary spillway, the water level got down to the bottom of the corrugated metal pipe and then inflow seemed about equal to outflow and it wasn't going down any more than the trickle through a muck of rotted leaves and algae. We intended to use an expansive foam adhesive and sealant to install a new riser and inlet by inserting this construction into the CMP, and that required clean and no-wetter-than-damp conditions. How now to lower the water level enough to dry and clean the inside of the pipe?

The CMP comes out of the embankment on the downstream side about 20 feet below the inlet, so a siphon ought to be possible. Alan suggested garden hose and I went to fetch those, but I saw this flexible drainspout hose and brought it back instead. We stuck one end down the pipe and struggled for quite a while to establish a siphon, but never really came close. The hose was too flexible in volume and too large in diameter to hold a charge of water after we filled it and shoved one end down the CMP. As soon as we released that end of the hose, water drained out faster than we could lower it, so the siphon never caught. But we worked our hands raw in the icy water. The sensation of cold was...notable.

Our discussion returned briefly to the garden hoses, but it would have required more than a half-dozen of them to move very much water. We had no way to keep them from clogging, and they were stiff and brittle in the cold in any event.

We were bested. Our hands were chapped and scraped and took three days to heal.

We called the pump rental place.

The last half-inch is the hardest:

Alan brought home a 3" trash pump, which we estimated could lower the pond by six inches within a couple of days. We set it up on the top of the embankment – you can see that it is quite steep, and the vibrating contraption would have jiggled into the pond if we tried to put it on the slope.

We had a bit of a challenge priming the pump – with the inlet and outlet running steeply downhill, it took a lot of water to fill the pump and the inlet hose and enough of the outlet hose that the pump would keep operating once started, and until we got the inlet into the pond. By elevating and filling the hoses and the pump, then flinging the inlet into the pond as the engine caught and the pump turned, we began to move water.

The inlet hose barely extended to the water, and kept clogging with all the muck in the shallow water near the bank.

You can see that the outlet flow doesn't amount to much, compared to the flow shown in the previous post when we pulled out the old riser.

Alan worked diligently to keep the pump inlet clear of muck, but we would have been doing this for the next 48 hours. How to get better performance out of the pump?

You can see how low the pond is. This image looks south along the dam and the lane. We call this area the Isthmus. Just beyond the falling snag is the emergency spillway, and the dam is designed to impound water to nearly that level, about three feet above where it is now. If we can fill it again to that level by installing a primary spillway that doesn't leak, we can increase the area of the pond by a good third, maybe a half – a huge difference.

We needed a construction barge and at Alan's inspiration, I shipped the anchors on the Deck Dock and poled it from the beach to the work site.

Now we could get the inlet into deep water where it wouldn't clog, and run the pump at full capacity.

The outlet hose wasn't long enough. We tied it and duct-taped it to the failed siphon drain hose, and ran that down over a layer of geotextile to prevent erosion of the embankment, and into the channel at the outlet works. You can see how much more water we were moving now. We ran the pump until 9:30 p.m. and the pond level was down a couple inches, below the bottom of the CMP.

The next day we ran the pump another four hours, and that afternoon installed the new primary spillway. Now we wait for the pond to rise again.

Building Bridges

No matter how dry or cold it's been, Kincaide Creek continues to flow, which means we need a way to get across it and, if we want to get to the other side with a vehicle but without using the public road, we need a bridge.

We salvaged these timbers from the old boxcar house a friend tore down. We cut them to rough 20' lengths before dragging them home, and then spent a couple of hours over the weekend removing the bulk of the old nails and hardware that might get in the way of their reuse.

Now that the metal is gone, we have a much better idea as to the condition of our future bridge beams, and can start to work up a plan for construction. It would be nice to get two bridges worth of beams out of what we have, but the condition of some of the beams is questionable. I'm not about to dump thhe tractor in the creek, though, so rest assured, the resultant design will be conservative.

On the Ice World of Amnac

And on the first day of the new year, I ventured upon the frozen pond.

In the morning sunlight, the four-inch thick ice began cracking with its little shifts and expansions. Here is a recording I made from the beach:

Pond Ice – January 01, 2013 by American Nacre

Reviewing these photographs (remember that you can click on an image to enlarge it), I was struck by the similarity to aerial views of the Great American Desert.

Frost on the surface:

Trapped bubbles, like water- and wind-sculpted sandstone monuments:

The snow cover has made apparent the extent of active animal life on the farm. Here is a major deer crossing of the ditch along the lane, and you can see the tracks converging and diverging on each side.

It appears we have an injured or lame deer. Note the tracks on the left in this image with one hoof dragged over the snow. I've followed these tracks all over the property but found no evidence of how an injury might have occurred. The hunter with whom we agreed to share a deer has only been on the place a couple times and so far as we know has not taken a shot. Alan's efforts to hunt coyote have been the same.

This is the breach in the lowest of the four terraces in the observatory field, just above The Narrows on the lane, caused by overtopping due to failure or insufficient capacity of the drain beneath the terrace. Restoring this structure will be a big job at some point. For now, though, the farm is at rest and the land given over to the animals and birds.