Sky pond awakes
How's the sky pond doing, you may be wondering? (Okay, you probably weren't, but I was.)
From a distance, the answer would be --- not good. It got too muddy for me to replace the gutter line
Lucy tore up, so the area I was trying to channel water out of is pure
mud. Not very photogenic or efficient to walk through.
But Lucy reminded me to look closer....
In the pond itself, I was
surprised by the masses of living things waking up from the cold
winter. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of these
little water snails lining the walls, eating decaying vegetation.
Last summer, the parrot's feather and duckweed really took off, and most
of the plants didn't survive the winter, so there's plenty of
decomposing vegetation in the pond now to feed the snails. If I
could think of an easy way to harvest them, I suspect I could get enough
protein out of these little critters to feed our flock for a day or
two, leaving plenty of snails behind to repopulate the pond.
I don't know if the
parrot's feather will come back to life, but the duckweed is already
spreading across the surface. The chorus frogs moved in about a
week ago, and have been yelling in Mark's ears ever since, leaving
behind their little clusters of eggs that will soon turn into
tadpoles. And lots of little water insects are scurrying about in
the water. Maybe Mark's right and this pond could host a goldfish
or two this year.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.