Burn My Time
~Josh Houghtelin
Time to be outside.
I haven’t spent much time inside after work lately becuas it’s been so nice. We’ve had a few cold days and even had a little snow fall although it melted instantly when it hit the ground. Zippy and I have been spending nearly every spare moment outside. This summer looks to be a very productive one.
We’ve started tilling up the ground where we want to have gardens. Zippy has been learning a lot about gardening all the while starting a bunch of plants in the kitchen. Here are a few bales lined up around a soon to be garden bed. Zippy is learning about hay bale gardening, composting and all sorts of crazyness.
I’ve spent a bit of time working on the pond. I want to try and keep the algea down this year if possible. I’ve already installed one 2,000 gallon an hour pump in the pond which is currently just blasting water out of a hose back into the pond. My intention is to setup two of them. One pump is going to be a fountain airiating the pond and the other will airiate a little by being the source of water for the small waterfall (you can kind of see the rocks I’m starting to stack up on the far side of the pond) but more importantly it will be pushing water to spickets placed on both sides of the pond so Zippy can water the gardens with pond water. I haven’t ordered the second pump yet.
This is how I initially setup the first pump. It’s on a thick wood skid pallet (untreated so I’m sure this will change by next year, we’ll see). My intention was to have one pump that acted as a fountain and source of water for hoses but although it pushes 2,000 GPH it does not create much pressure so this idea failed. I will be ordering another pump to airiate the water. This one is now reconfigured to have two hose attachments which currently just run hoses to the edge of the pond where I will affix a more permanent hose connection. It doesn’t provide much pressure but it pushes out more than enough water to water gardens. The next step after this (maybe next year after we figure out where all our gardens are) is to build an in-ground automatic or timed garden watering system.
Edit: This photo is also missing the cage around the pump so fish don’t get sucked in.
Bring on the Koi! A bit of this pond work is being done so we can keep our Koi alive. Zippy and I have done a bit of reading and found that Koi can be very healthy in large natural mud ponds like ours. They like the high temperature the pond will reach in the summer and should get along fine with the frogs so now we have 2 Koi and 4 Sarassas fish in our pond. Sarassas are bright red/orange and white like Koi but they are a little smaller and not quite as expensive. If all goes well we will get more Koi next year.
That’s all I’ve got for now. I hope to purchase a concrete mixer before long that will really help with a lot of these summer projects. I may slide into posting videos instead of text and images this summer. I just have to remember to bring the video camera with me more often. Cheers!
