Good morning all. This is the DailyKos Ssturday morning Home Repair Blog. I am your host James, also known as exlrrp.
this is where the DailyKos community comes to talk about Home repair, Remodeling, building and any other related (and unrelated) topics. Feel free to ask questions and or comment as appropriate and youre sure to get an answer.
My latest projects have been pond repair and work. The last 5 years have been very dry for Oregon, we're currently at about half of our normal water year. What that means is instead of having 26 times as much water as we need, we have only about 14 times as much as we need. Still quite a lot but it gets worrisome. We're provided with our water by a gravity fed spring tank and it gets pretty slow sometimes. We've only gone completely dry once, a couple of years ago when a coyote chewed into the line, since been fixed.
What also happens is our ponds have gone completely dry, something that didn't happen before. This is the first time.
We have two ponds, an Upper and a Lower. the Upper Pond is about 1000 square feet, the lower about 1500.
A pond always wants to become a marsh and then ultimately fills itself in if you don't take action. Trees fall over into the water, reeds choke it up.
So my latest project is to clean these up while I can get in easy. This involves a lot of brush, reed and tree removal (real presidential, ehh? teehee)
The picture below is of the lower pond while there was still water in it---it's entirely empty now, very forlorn looking. About 75% of what you see as water was reeds when I first started working on it 4 years ago. What I did this time was take out the tree to the right and those little pines on the back side (notice the Royal Exlrrp Navy boat? Yes, its an El Toro)
Here's the lower pond from the other side:
here's a picture of me working, a very rare sight these days. This is a definite Sisyphean task.
The Upper pond was where most of the work was and I'm sorry I don't have a picture of it. Two big trees had fallen into the pond and it was a chainsaw job to get them out, then haul all the scraps to the burn pile. Wish Mrs exlrrp would train one of her horses to do some actual work!
Well, thats how I spent the last week. I'll open the topic up for discussion now and let the smart people take over