Took the day off from work Friday and dug the hole for my new pond skimmer/ pump assembly. I have been looking for the right set up for a while and finally found it at a local garden center, Sunnyside, out on Rt 65 outside Sharpsburg, MD. They had one installed in their large water garden and one of the guys took the time to show me how it works. It has a removable skimmer basket that is easy to empty and a filter mat for biological filtering as well. It was not cheap but it is going to save me alot of work unclogging my pump. I managed to get it all plumbed (2 trips to home depot) and leveled and then we reworked some of the liner and rock on the edges today. We got all the water and muck emptied out last weekend and hauled more than 6 wagon loads of smelly ooze to the garden. Today I tilled it in and its ready for corn and buckwheat.
It took awhile to fill the pond up with water when we finally finished today, so I went riding. Mara, my horse has been getting kind of crazy lately because I have not been riding her enough. Sometimes she acts like I am a scarey monster and I can’t get near her at all. She always comes around for dinner time time though so I’ve got her number.
Now that the pond is full I have turned on the pump, which is very quiet, and the waterfall is running full. I still have to clean up the garden and the sitting area around it but it so nice to hear it again. It is a very soothing sound and I am hopingto sleep toit will help me to sleep better. It has been about 2 years since I have had a functional pump and the critters have missed it as much as I have. The birds found it again within minutes of me starting it up. They love to take baths in the shallow areas of the waterfalls. Hopefully the way we have shored up the edge where the deer always drink will keep the far side liner from slipping. We redug the ledge and used much larger rocks to stabiliae it this time. It is alot easier to work on when it is dry. I was wearing hip waders when working on it last weekend.
I will post some pictures and write some more when we have some rainy days, which looks like later this week.
In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of something huge right outside my bedroom window, crashing and splintering the ice on the water garden. I struggled out of the covers, and peered out the window, attempting to adjust my sleep filled eyes to the stark moonlight, trying to focus. A humongous, white cow was just emerging from the icy water and clambering up the far bank. This was a full grown Charolais cow! She had her heavy self and four very sharp hooves, digging around in my hand dug, rubber lined, fish pond. This was not good. I do not keep any cows these days, only a few sheep, horses and chickens. I let them wander around loose on the lawn sometimes to graze, and they will take an occasional drink from the pond, but they don’t ever step down into it. Well, I have seen a chicken or two get wetter than they planned, but they don’t weigh much. They don’t swim well and there is a lot of squawking involved. It is not normal for someone’s cow to be loose in my yard. I sure hope the stupid lummox hasn’t punctured the pond liner. It was designed to handle the weight of a deer hoof but a deer is about nine hundred pounds lighter than a cow. It won’t be possible to repair it until spring and the fish, plants and frogs, down under the mud, will die if the water leaks out now.
This winter has been unusually cold and the water buckets out in the barn keep freezing up solid- every single day lately. We don’t usually get temperatures below zero before January, but it has been down to minus four degrees Fahrenheit already, and has not gone above freezing during the day for three weeks now. I had to buy a plug in stock tank heater, and run an extension cord from the feed room, to try and keep the water open for drinking. There must have been something wrong with the electrical grounding, though, and now I can’t use it. The youngest horse, Cambriana, kept snagging the heater out of the tank with her teeth and throwing it out of the way before she would drink. It was bizarre. I couldn’t figure out why she was doing that. Finally, I put my fingers in the barely warmed water and felt the slightest electrical charge through my hand. Since I was wearing rubber barn boots, and horses are grounded directly through their hoofs, she probably felt more of a zap than I did. So, I’m back to flipping the buckets upside down, kicking the ice out, and hauling two five gallon buckets of water at a time from the house.
Barn path
This is a real pain when the snow is deep and drifts across the path I shoveled the day before. I do appreciate having a clean, snowy barnyard instead of a sloppy, muddy one though, so the cold is good for something. When it finally thaws out this spring, I am bound and determined to finally dig a trench out to the barn and bury a water line and electric line out to the barn. Somehow it never seems like such a priority in the warmer weather, when I can easily run a hose out there, and I have been putting it off too long.
Cows can do an amazing amount of damage in a short period of time to shrubs, perennials and lawns, even with the ground frozen. I do not want her hanging around and wrecking more than she has already. My shrubs and fruit trees might look pretty tasty to an herbivore with a boring diet of dried up hay. Since it is way too early to call anybody, I go out to the mudroom, pull on my winter coveralls and snow boots over my flannel pajamas, and head outside to shoo the beast out of the yard. It is really cold outside, the kind of cold that instantly freezes your nose hairs, and I waste no time. I step out the basement door with my arms waving and give her a shout,
“ GIT! Get out of here you stupid cow! Git! You are going to freeze your butt off getting all wet like that. Get on out of here! Git! Git on home! Get out of here! Shoo! Go On!”
Finally, she goes lumbering off through the front woods and I quickly get back inside to warm up by the woodstove. Before heading upstairs to bed I stoke up the stove with some more locust logs and wait for it to take off. At least the house will be nice and warm in the morning.
After I climb back in bed I lay there hoping the pond is not starting to leak. I think up different ways to save my fish and plants if the water level drops drastically over night, mentally locating plastic tubs I can use as temporary aquariums. I listen for the sound of the water pump running dry, even as I drift back to sleep. The pump, which sits down in the water, under the ice, keeps a three- tiered, gurgling, waterfall running twenty four seven. It makes for a soothing sound, good to sleep to, and also quite effective at screening out my neighbors’ barking dogs. The water flows fast enough to keep it from freezing up, and will run through the coldest winter, creating wonderful ice sculptures down each fall. The sound changes according to how much ice forms, but it almost always keeps a small area at the base of the falls open and the wildlife takes full advantage of it. It is a great place to set up the deer camera and watch raccoons, skunks, deer, foxes, oppossums and birds drink.
When I woke up and had breakfast I followed the cows tracks out through the front woods. There were boot prints right behind them and a pick-up truck parked out on the opposite lane, so I figured her owner knew about her escape and was on top of it. I did not think too much more about it until almost dark when I went out to do the evening chores, and there she was again, on the front lawn, just passing through. So I called all my neighbors with cattle and asked if they were missing one from their herd. No one would claim her. My nearest neighbor said,
“It couldn’t be mine. I’ve got American wire and it won’t get holes in it.”
Ha, Ha. So I called the guy further down the road whose fence actually has two huge holes in it, from when two different vehicles went through it the other day during the snow, and whose cows are known to be impossible to catch. He actually came over and took a look at her and announced,
“Nope, mine are all Hereford crosses. Don’t have any fancy Charolais ones. Pretty though, ain’t she? I could take her if you don’t find her people.”
The cow wandered off again, and I went to bed thinking that if she showed up again I would pen her up in my front paddock and start calling her my own personal freezer beef.
The next morning I heard the sound of men and tractors across the road and went to investigate and say howdy over the fence. The man with the “American wire” fence was loading a freshly killed Red Angus cow unto the back of a pickup. She had broken her leg on the slippery ground and had to be put down. When I asked him about the loose Charolais cow, he said,
“She couldn’t be mine. We tried to get her in with the others yesterday and she would not cooperate. One of my cows would have been easy to get in.”
This reasoning did not make a lot of sense. Cows are notoriously stubborn and the grass is probably greener on this side, if you can just manage to find it under the snow. Later, however, his wife told me that they did manage to get her in with a bucket of grain, so she must be theirs after all. I guess they have no idea what their own cows look like. You’d think they would all have ear tags or tattoos or something. I mean, they are worth a lot of money when you go to sell them.
Meanwhile, there is no longer a cow cruising through the yard, and things have settled down. So far the pond is still holding water, so it looks like I will not need to repair it after all. However, my freezer still has some room left in it for the next unclaimed beef that wanders in.
Wendy lee Maddox – March 23, 2014, writing at edgewisewoods.com
It has been a productive few days. After digging up and moving all the daffodils last weekend we were finally ready to have some topsoil brought in to raise that bed. The topography had changed during the construction we had done on the house back in 2004 and water had been pooling there ever since. I could not get it delivered on short notice last weekend so set up a time this past Friday for them to come. I wanted to raise the bed at least a foot and it is about thirty feet long so I ordered seven yards of the topsoil Leafgro mix from Potomac Farms in Shepherdstown. The mix they brought me was excellent quality and the driver was able to spread it down the bed as he dumped it so we don’t have to move it around much. Leafgro is compost made in Dickerson Maryland from all the leaves they collect in Montgomery County. I have used it as a soil amendment for many years in my landscaping business and it is good stuff. I used to order it twenty yards at a time direct from the plant. Now all I have to do is decide what I am going to plant there and find the plants.
Seven Yards of Topsoil/ Leafgro ready for planting
I am thinking either three hardy, red Crepe Myrtles or possibly some native Halesia caroliniana (Silverbells) or maybe Viburnums with an under planting of perennials and bulbs. I also thought about putting some HighBush Blueberry in there but their form is a little too scraggly for such an entrance bed. I want a neat appearance, blooms, fall color, and winter interest as well, so it will take some thought. At least I am finally ready to plant whatever I find.
We have a gravel drive about 600 feet long leading to our house. It goes through the neighbors’ property on the way to ours and is technically a road but since it is just the two houses and we share maintenance we keep it simple. Our neighbors used to put gravel on their portion of it fairly often, every few years. We however, have only put down gravel one other time in the last twenty years and that was right after we had some major construction done on the house about ten years ago. This winter has been a little rough on the road though, with lots of snow and serious bouts of freezing and thawing. It also did not help that we took a ditch witch last fall and dug a trench down the center to lay our new phone line. That brought some subsurface clay up to the top. So I started looking for guys to haul gravel, first on Craig’s List, then on Google and was not having a lot of luck. Gravel guys do not seem to do the internet thing very well.
Then I remembered to look in the “house repair” folder in my filing cabinet and actually found the receipt from ten years ago, for 18.75 tons of gravel. I called the number, which still worked, and left a message with C.W Gray Trucking in Martinsburg. They called back a short while later and we set a day for him to bring me out a 20 ton load and spread it. We both took Friday off from work, using our built up credit hours, and set the day aside for puttering about the yard. The driver called ahead to confirm the night before and the truck arrived only about 45 minutes later than he planned. There are always variables to consider in construction and trucking, such as how many are ahead of you in line at the quarry. I showed him the most important spots and he walked it to calibrate the speed he would need to drive in order to spread it at the proper depth and length. He set the tailgate chains so it would only open about a foot at the bottom and headed out the drive at a pretty good clip and did a really nice job of getting an even spread.
Newly graveled drive
It looked so good I wanted to get another load and do the rest of the drive too. He was able to drive back to the quarry, pick up another twenty tons, and spread it for us an hour later. This time we had him leave about 3 tons of it in a pile so we could fill nooks and crannies and be sure to have a deeper area of gravel in the muddy spot where I usually park my pickup. The total cost worked out to about $16.50 per ton and was well worth it.
Jeff spent Saturday hauling wagon and wheelbarrow loads of gravel to low spots, out to the mailbox, and in front of the garage doors. I raked the bits of gravel that had bounced into the grass back in to the drive along the whole length of it and smoothed out his piles.
Newly planted Early Veggies
I also managed to get in the veggie garden and plant ten pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes, a short row of Sugar Snap peas, a half pound of yellow onion sets, and some spinach and lettuce. I don’t care if it IS supposed to snow on Tuesday. I am calling it Spring.
Crocus
We were both exhausted and sore at the end of the day and treated ourselves to a smoothie from Mellow Moods in town. We collapsed on the couch and watched an early movie, “After Earth” with Will Smith and his son, which was pretty good, and were in bed by 9:30.
It is very satisfying to have the whole drive freshly graveled and it will last another ten years I am sure.
West Virginia has more than one area with a water crisis and you should not rely on your State Health Department to protect you. Here in the Eastern Panhandle where folks don’t worry about problems caused by the oil and gas industry we have a different water problem our leaders refuse to address and it can cause serious health problems. We are situated on Karst which means that those sinkholes that appear out in the pastures, along the roads, and maybe even in your backyard, provide a direct shot to the groundwater below. You may have learned in school that rainwater water is naturally filtered through many layers of soil before it makes its way down to our wells, but not in Karst. Our underlying rocks are made of limestone which is easily worn down by water, and especially by the acidified water produced by emissions of the coal fired power plants to the west of us. Our limestone is riddled with holes and active water channels, leading to underground streams and saturated ground pools, and our wells are drilled into this, even 300 foot deep wells. When a new sinkhole opens up it is often because the ground underneath has collapsed due to rerouting of underground water from heavy rain events, or large airspaces that have been created during droughts. Sinkholes can act like funnels channeling surface water and debris directly into our water table and into our well water. Our shallow septic systems can also leach into this underground reservoir, as can road salt, fresh manure from livestock and wildlife and pollutants from garbage dumps.
Garbage Under Sinkhole
I was made acutely aware of all this when, after living in our house out Engle Molers way for 18 years, my husband and I both became sick with some kind of gastro intestinal illness. Numerous Doctors could not explain what was wrong with us. We are active people with a fairly healthy, low fat diet, not used to being sick and we tried everything we could think of to get healthy again. After spending a lot of money on Dr bills and many tests, landing in the emergency room three times, and being miserable for two years, we both ended up losing our gallbladders. They did not have stones or any of the usual symptoms, they just ceased functioning and died. Jeff’s gallbladder got gangrene and almost killed him, mine was caught and removed before it got that bad. After all that, I finally had an epiphany and thought to have our water analyzed. The results came back with large amounts of Escherichi coli (E.coli) which is the organism labs use for detection of contamination. If you have that, you generally have other mammal based fecal contaminants as well. When I told the Doctors, their response was that long term ingestion of bacteria laden water explained why we had all the symptoms of Giardia even though we had not been drinking out of creeks or visiting third world countries with poor sanitation. It also explained what had finally killed our gallbladders.
The fix was actually quite simple after we knew what we were dealing with. We installed an Ultra Violet filtering system on the water line coming in to the house. I had the water retested after installation and it is safe to drink now. I retest annually. I sent a flyer out to all my neighbors letting them know they might want to check their water as well and got this response from many of them, “Our house failed the water test when we bought the house and we had to install a UV filter system to pass inspection and buy it.” That was news to me! I contacted our County Health Department and asked why they had not let surrounding people know when the groundwater was contaminated and was told it was just my lines in my house, not the groundwater. I contacted the State Health Department via email and got no response at all, ever. I had a friend bring it up at a water control board meeting and they also refused to acknowledge that there was a problem. No one in government wants to accept responsibility or take action for a known and obvious health risk. Apparently it opens a liability issue for them, so we have to look after ourselves.
Floating Garbage Underground
As to cause, I believe our local water contamination occurred when the neighbors who used to live across the road ceased their dog rescue operation and all the dog manure was bulldozed into the large sinkhole, just upstream (underground that is) of us. All the old barrels, vehicles and other junk in the hole got covered over then as well. There are other possible avenues for our groundwater contamination locally. For instance, Bakerton is full of open sinkholes that people throw their trash into which lands in the old flooded quarry below. The quarry is fed by underground streams and also feeds springs out in the Potomac River. All the water around here is connected and it moves quite fast without any meaningful filtering occurring along the way. Dye trace studies have been done to track the movement of our underground water here in Jefferson County This photo from: http://www.slideshare.net/WVAGP/epan09-using-lidar-to-map-sinkholes
and it is well documented. Your own well could be connected to underground streams miles from you and may have picked up contaminants from leaking storage tanks, landfills or even correctly built septic systems. Don’t wait for the Health Department to protect you, have your water tested yourself by an independent lab. I have used the Fredericktowne Lab in Myersville myself. You can drop off a water sample and get the water results via email quickly.
This photo from: