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Answers
Drinking the Small Pond Down I really haven’t been avoiding blogging. I’ve tried to do it, but I’ve just been exhausted in the evening, which is my usual writing time, and haven’t stayed awake long enough to finish writing. Obviously we’ve made it back to Fallbrook, pulling in about 9 pm on Saturday. Many things happened during my five days gone. As I am about to frost a Buttermilk Chocolate Ganache Cake (see recipes!) (I occasionally sell baked goods) that will be picked up at 7 am tomorrow, I’ll provide answers to the questions I posed before leaving on my Oregon Or Bust sojourn.
A Full Pond! Yes, the pond was filled! Gloriously full, and with a boat blowing from shore to shore in the breeze! The boat is on loan from Aquascape, who uses it in their work, but put out to float just to show off the pond for my return. Water plants are being transplanted and seeded around the ‘wicking’ areas, and the streambed area for rain is being sculpted. I’m not the only one who enjoys the pond!
If he thinks he can sleep on the couch after this....! The palm trunks are being made into a bridge, which isn’t quite finished yet.
Bridge to Be The cement stairs now have posts for a walk-through arbor.
Gateway to the Garden The gnawed-upon palm stairs are even more gnawed-upon, but there are piles of bunny poo left where the culprits spent plenty of time wearing down their ever-growing teeth! The Bitter Apple didn’t seem to make a difference when I sprayed it on the steps. I’ll need to try garlic next.
Bunny Poo As for my veggie garden, the pumpkin and watermelon have grown at least two feet in a week, and the pickling cucumbers have outgrown the two lengths of support twine that I put up above their heads just before leaving!
Vigorous Cukes I’ve added more and guided them up. All the plants not only survived, but they thrived. I so cannot wait for the taste of my own first of the season tomato!
Happy Vines I still have a question, though. Why is it that a roadside stand in Oregon sells avocados for .35 cents apiece, when back home – in the Avocado Capital of the US – they sell for $1.45 apiece in the grocery store? And they aren’t very nice, either! You can’t grow avos in Oregon, or at least in that wet and cold part of it.
Not all the irrigation has been buried, but a good deal has. The sunflower will not raise it’s head again. The pond is slightly green, but picturesque and natural-looking; I don’t want an unnaturally clear pond. So all in all, a great week!
The First Zucchini... uh-oh! 
A Hidden Broccoli Head -
Well, Well, Well!
A Big Rig The battle for the water looks as if it is slowly being won. Today a 100 foot deep eight inch hole was drilled behind my pond. I feel sorry for the earth, like a big mosquito has stabbed into it’s bedrock.Fain drillers had quite a time maneurvering their truck in backwards. A portion of the fence had to be removed for the ginormous truck to back in. Then it had to move back and forth by inches to get around all the plants and rocks.
Backing through the fence 
Backing down the property Finally it was in place, and they balanced the truck with lifts so that the back end was off the ground!
Leveling the truck Raising the drill bit was very impressive. It is so tall!
So tall! As they drilled, up came slurry of water, clay, and decomposed granite.
Water and slurry They drilled 100 feet today, and and found water that is moving at about fifteen gallons per minute.
Adding bits For the drip system, I only need a mere five. However, I don’t know what may happen, if I may want to hook the house water up to the well some year or something. If I have them drill more deeply now since thieir truck is in the yard, the well might have a better rate of flow, better water, and possibly a more reliable supply.
Changing parts What I have might be just fine, and there is no guarantee that anything will improve with more drilling. I’ll make my descision over the weekend. On Tuesday they’ll drill some more if I want it, then put in a casing, gravel around the casing, cement the top, and then we can lower the pump and get well water! Cross my fingers!
Mean-looking grinding bit -
Pond Progress
Happy Earth Day!
As of today, I have a very large hole in the ground with a little puddle in it!
A Vernal Pool? The major tractor work was finished by Dan Barnes (if you need mowing, disking, or any kind of tractor work, he’s the guy to call at 760-731-0985). A pump was set up in our shallow well and it started… then stopped. The water was so silty that it plugged the pump, and the refill rate isn’t very quick in the tube, either. So unfortunately the goal of having a full pond by the end of the day today was not realized.
The Pump Work will resume on Monday with a flushing of the well. Dan found a lot more bottles buried in the middle about three feet down. No Inca gold, though. Dan also moved some boulders around and disked the soil along the pathway that rainwater will take through the property.
Dragging Boulders 
Tilled watercourse Finish work with the small tractor will be done beginning next week. The good thing about the pond not being filled yet, is that my dog General, who is a cross between two waterdogs, won’t be soaking wet for Easter. He’s still enjoying being in the house while there are trucks and tractors in the yard.
Pond in the Evening with a set rock Also today more stairs were created at my request by Roger’s team of Juan and Francisco in the area leading down the hill, which was just too slippery. They squared up the hearts of some palms this time rather than just cutting off the tops. The resulting white rectangles look incredible.
Palm Stairs I’ve noticed a lot more birds and lizards in the yard, even with the workmen disturbing the peace. I really can’t wait until the project is finished and I have regained tranquility on my property. After the ponds are in there is still more planting and irrigation to be installed. Sigh. Have a wonderful Easter Sunday!
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Permaculture Garden Update
Entrance Lots of hard work is being done on the property, and the garden is taking on character. Bits of the palms that were cut down are being used in so many ways. The upright trunks that were left have been stripped, and metal poles were tied between them. I didn’t care for the look of the poles, so Roger immediately came up with the idea of wrapping them with palm fronds… and it looks great. The above photo is of the future ‘formal entranceway’ to the garden. Francisco and Juan were working from the tops of ladders in full sunlight on this unseasonably hot day… it must have been over 90 degrees out there. Summer weather too early! I’m glad that it is going to cool down a little starting tomorrow.
Arbor They also covered metal poles that they criss-crossed the trunks in the palm walkway. Up all of the trunks are a variety of flowering vines, and also climbing heirloom roses. I ordered the roses from Heirloom Garden Roses (http://www.heirloomroses.com/), and the plants are small but healthy and virorgous. I made little cages out of leftover chicken wire from the chicken tractor to set over them; otherwise, the bunnies would nibble the young rose leaves down to nothing. Beneath the palms, many plants that will create the plant guilds are in the ground and mulched with chipped palmsand surrounded with rocks. Rocks have also been placed around the property to add character and interest. The palm sheaths that were skinned from the trunks will be used on top of the mulch as a secondary layer; its interesting to look at, is textured and therefore makes interesting hidey-holes for lizards, salamanders and all sorts of creatures. Most planting will now cease until the important decisions about installing the rainfall retention ponds, dry creek beds, swales and the permanent (swimming?) pond are made. We met with more people this week about the pond installation and are awaiting bids and ideas. I’m looking for the most sustainable, least impact and easiest way of installing them, and we may have found a company that understands this. More about the ponds when decisions have been made.
Other work has concentrated on the embankment and the erosion areas there. This is the area below the fence; the embankment with the streambed is on the right, and the main property is beyond the upper left corner of the photo. This area had been leveled, firmed, mulched, and old broken pipes and wires that had been a junky retaining wall was replaced with old chainlink fencing and aluminum from the sheds. Then palm logs were used to line the cut-out area around the left to help hold the soil. Palm fronds were installed all along the top of the chainlink on the right…
Erosion area and also on the next level which is in the process of being firmed, repaired and made available for bird watching, including a very
- Lower level
handy bench. This area had been greatly eroded, especially by the December deluge. An enormous toyon has tipped over and its roots are exposed on the embankment. From this vantage point out over the embankment my daughter and I could watch a lot of birds flying between the canopy of the streambed trees. You can see from this photo also how the palm fronds have been used to block the lower side of the fence. In the bottom left corner is some of the old corrugated aluminum that had been there from the previous owner, and which is still holding up. It will be blocked by fronds as well. Past this point and around the corner is a big erosion area which ends the pathway. It is being worked on. With the ponds, streams, mulch and swales in place, as well as these bulwarks of wire and aluminum, the chance of such heavy erosion happening again even in the worst rainstorms is almost nil. The property will be augmented to deal with excessive waterflow as well as insufficient amounts.
I am still tossing around ideas about buildings to replace the sheds. I need a tool/mower storage shed, a small ‘bee house’ where we can store our bee equipment and work on honey extraction without the bees bothering us (we’ve extracted honey in our kitchen), and I’d like a small greenhouse or growing house for seedlings. I also would like small building or trailer that could be used as a guest house, as well as an area for groups of people to gather for teaching purposes. I’m getting prices and ideas on how to do all this cost-effectively. I’ve looked into Quality Sheds in Menifee, asked the carpenter who did my other projects to give me a bid, and have researched trailers, yurts, geodesic domes, straw bale… everything. So many decisions! But how fun it all is. That’s all for tonight, and thanks for reading. -
Permaculture Update
A Pile of Rocks As promised, I have more photos for you. Roger and his team have worked with all stops out for this last month and a half. Lots of heavy labor, skilled work and planning has been done. One of the big decisions that needs to be made next is about water. Besides digging a couple of unlined rain catchment ponds, which will perculate run-off into the soil and be dry most of the year, should there be a lined pond that would stay wet all year for birds and other wildlife. This pond would be cleaned by filtering the water through a bog area. Also, should I invest in a huge above-ground water tank to collect the thousands of gallons of water that pours off my house roof during rainstorms? So we are interviewing pond builders, and having pow-wows with other professionals who know about water.In the meanwhile, many trees and small plants have been planted, about half the pile of urea spread and tilled in.
Tilled and mulched I am not an advocate of tilling in healthy soil. It tears apart the microbes and underground inhabitants that are what changes dirt into soil. About twelve years ago when I first moved here, I succumbed to those enticing Troy-Bilt tiller ads and purchased a 6 HP tiller; an enormous investment at the time, but with all this weedy property I thought it would help me ‘fix’ the soil. The tiller came dismantled. After a lot of trouble putting it together and getting it running, the machine I bought turned out not to be a tiller, but a device that endeavors to separate your arms from your torso and dislocate each vertibrae in your spine, all without actually tilling anything. The Troy-Bilt ad photos that show a neatly dressing young woman casually standing by her tiller pushing it with one hand, leads one to believe that the tillers are easy to run. Actually, the lady in the photo is having a good time only because the tiller isn’t turned on! She’s leaning on it! Someone made all those groves in the dirt with a hoe, because that tiller sure didn’t! You may surmise from that rant that I didn’t have much luck tilling, so the machine sat in my shed until recently. It was just repaired and yesterday, having been starved for so long, it tried to eat Roger as he used it around my property. Roger is a big, strong man, so I don’t feel so badly about having been so unsuccessful with using the tiller that I wanted to chain it in a dark celler where it wouldn’t hurt anyone again. Despite the evil tendancies of this machine, much urea has been tilled in around the planted trees, which is the first layer in the plant guilds that form the edible forest garden. Under the trees, other components of the guilds are being planted. Those components perform what roles plants in a natural forest hold: mulchers, groundcovers, shade, insect-attractors, nitrogen-fixers, and nutrient-miners. The guilds will grow larger as the project unfolds.
Jose and Roger with the first load of rocks Rocks are a wonderful focal point in any garden, and we needed a lot of them. With predicted rain this weekend, and the probability that the 10-wheeler wouldn’t be able to access the yard with the soil any softer, sped up the delivery date to… ASAP. Two deliveries of boulders were deposited today, and starting at 7 am tomorrow, several more loads will be dropped. I can just see all the lizards on the property rubbing their little hands together in anticipation of a great king-of-the-hill push-up contest. Two sections of my wooden fence had to be disassembled so the truck could pull directly into the yard. Later, the boulders will be placed with a small Bobcat. This is a nice mixture of rock, and this first load pictured shows the largest of the boulders. This is about 12 tons of rock. I can’t wait for time alone to go climbing! 🙂
I asked Roger if he knew a really good carpenter to help build some items for me, and he did. Local carpenter Jay Tull was brought into the job and is also a craftsman of skill, inspiration, problem-solving, and a lot of fun ideas. He made two top-bar bee hives first of all (I’ll go into bee hives in another post, as well as my blue bee garden), using almost all leftover materials on the property. They are beautiful. Next, I wanted to build a little fenced area to block off my trash and recycling cans so my long-suffering neighbors didn’t have to look at them anymore.
Garbage Can Closet or Guest House? So with lumber and more of that broken concrete (which actually came from his property!), he and Roger’s team are working on an incredible enclosure that probably should be a guest house! The walls, made of leftover fencing, and a gate will be added probably tomorrow after the cement all dries. Jay suggested that the cement chunks be cemented in rather than surrounded with gravel for easy hosing down. There is room for a planter on the side! Another project Jay is working on concurrently is a chicken tractor.
- Chicken Tractor in the Making
There are many websites devoted to just images of chicken tractors. These are portable chicken coops that rest on the ground. The idea is that the chickens root around in the ground weeding, pooing, eating bugs, etc., which is all extremely healthy for the birds and great for the soil. Then in a few days you move the tractor a little ways and set it down and they start on a new batch. I found a photo of one I liked, and Jay is building it almost entirely out of used wood from my old sheds, and wheels off my old gate. It works like an extremely heavy wheelbarrow; apparently the image I gave Jay to work from used two people to move it, but he’s adapted it for one person. I’ll show you the finished version in a couple of days. We’ve already joked about entering it in the Fallbrook Christmas Parade.
Other things that have been going on are the building of benches and seats for viewing areas around the property, using the materials that are here.
Jose and Francisco, Roger’s team, have stripped some of the palm trunks and cut them into chairs. This shows one set up on the newly repaired erosion area just above the barranca. Along the fence are planted more stonefruit, and on the other side of the fence are planted berry vines. The seat overlooks the mature toyons, sumac and willows that grow down the embankment, and a great place for bird watching. A garden isn’t a garden if there aren’t resting places for you to just sit and listen. 
Stumps along the Liquidamber AlleeToday Roger saw an adult kingsnake under the native plants on the embankment, and it startled and slithered away. I think this may be our annual visitor to our upper pond and birdbath. Every summer he shows up once or twice looking for mice and getting a good long drink from our pond, then disappears. I’m hoping he has his eye on our gopher population.
California Slendar Salamander So the loud machinery, sounds of screeching rocks sliding on metal, and the whiff of urea continues on my usually quiet and unobtrusive property. Some day in the near future it will again be quiet, and all the animals I’ve scared off will return. Actually, many birds have been enjoying the piles of brush, and Roger has encorporated some brushy piles into the design just to allow the birds and bunnies and lizards small havens.
These piles are small, and are located well away from the house so as not to cause a fire hazard. Also I was sorting through the stack of old plywood on the weekend and uncovered two California Slendar Salamanders. One was larger than the other, so I think that was the female. I removed them to my upper pond area so that they wouldn’t get squished. These wonderful discoveries of life on my property make me all the more determined to complete this project in as a compassionate and organic way as possible. My two elderly dogs, Sophie and General Mischief, have been having such a hard time of it. They lived their lives here outside, sleeping on an old futon in a small garage-type building. Now that they are both deaf, and Sophie likes to sneak out to go visit my long-suffering and wonderful neighbors, I’m afraid of them being injured with the gate opening and closing and large trucks pulling through. So, for the first time in their lives, they’ve had to adjust to living in my library on a sheet-protected couch. You can see how hard it is for them:
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Native Insects and IPM
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Spring Is Here
Spring is here Today I really felt that Southern California had shrugged off Winter. It was warm and a little humid out, my Satsuma plum is in full bloom, and my desert tortoise (endangered species; I’m his third owner and he’s licensed) Homer came out of hibernation in the closet. He’s still sleepy and grumpy, and I can relate to that.
I also saw the first Red Diamondback Rattlesnake today, newly emerged from hibernation, sunning itself in the cleft of a boulder about head height. My hiking buddy Alex and I were at Santa Margarita River Preserve, and there was this somnamulant reptile soaking in the sun and enjoying the radiating warmth of the rock. We posed right next to him or her, and he or she didn’t care. This would not be the case on a hot summer’s day!
This intermediate dry spell is important for the construction of the permaculture garden because the soil is still too wet to allow trucks down on the property. We are investigating the best way to create the ponds, which at this time will incorporate a dry rock creekbed that will catch and channel rainwater and allow it to perculate into the soil, another pond for water holding, and a possible natural swimming pond. The swimming pond works on the same concept as a natural greywater system. Beside the swimming area is another deep area filled with different grades of rock. Water plants which clean water with their roots are planted on top in a naturalistic way. Water is pumped into this area from the bottom, and as the water rises through the gravel and plant roots it becomes clear, then is transported into the swimming area. No chemicals needed; in fact, chemicals would ruin the biological balance of the pond. The swimming pond is clean and ready for human use, and also provides riparian habitat, food and acts as a watering hole for many animals. They are popular in Europe and other countries, and are slowly catching on here in America. Of course, people throughout time have swum in gunky swimming ponds; this is just making one for oneself. This is a YouTube link to a UK pond builder. He is hawking a video on his project, which is only available in the UK and thus wouldn’t play on US DVD players, but this short video tells a lot about swimming ponds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JoQthEBl6U . Clicking on this link will navigate you away from this page. I just love his Liverpudlian accent.
Today I became the owner of clumping giant bamboo, and a Buddha’s Hand citron. So very cool! The bamboo can be used for all kinds of structures, and with the citron I can make my own candied fruit for desserts. Did you know that candied fruit is called succade? Nope, neither did I.
Creepy, but fun and very fragrant. The fruits are mostly peel, and are used to scent rooms and clothes in Asia. Also planted were various stonefruits, including 4-in-1 apples, apricot, cherry, pear, peaches, nectarines and Asian pear. I also became the proud owner of two little kumquat trees. They are loaded with fruit, and since they were purchased from an organic nursery, this crop doesn’t have to go to waste (you eat kumquats whole).
So, after a morning of Zumba at the Fallbrook Community Center, planting and feeding my many animals, then four hours of intense hiking, my legs are trying to get me to walk upstairs to bed and stay there. Sounds like a good idea to me.
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The Monster in the Pond
Ok, ok, I’ll succumb to popular demand and tell my pond story. A number of years ago I came into possession of free pond liner and flagstone. My daughter and I hacked down a juniper that had taken over our front yard, pickaxed out all the roots and rocks, and after watching many YouTube how-to videos, built our Perfect Pond. I indulged in waterlilies, a priceylotus, and some other cute little water plants. We set free a few mosquito fish, and enjoyed our organic water feature. Well, it was better than we ever thought. It attracted birds, dragonflies, and Pacific Chorus Frogs. In fact, in early February, every frog in the county makes its way over to our little 400 gallon pond and begins their mating calls. They are so loud that we’ve had to shine a flashlight out the window at night to quiet them down to hear a movie! Soon we had evidence of amphibian genetic success.
Frog spawn! Then tadpoles, and tiny frogs that mostly disappeared somewhere until the following February. The mosquito fish found similar romantic success and soon numbered in the hundreds.
Other than giving the non-human youth a Lover’s Lane, as it were, the pond had its ups and downs; the raccoons just loved getting in and knocking over the expensive lotus plant, so it never flourished. Some very creepy flat-headed black wormy things appeared in the filter, the dragonfly larvae looked like the stars of B-movies in miniature, and some of the plants tried to take over the world. After a few years, I decided that there was too much plant growth and it needed to be thinned out. With rubber gloves on hands and an explorer’s enthusiasm, I went in. (Oh, and by the way, NEVER put pea gravel in your pond, no matter how many people say to on the Internet or in books. It’s too sharp to stand on, it can wreck your liner with its pointy edges, and it makes a dead biomass on the bottom of your pond. Thanks, I had to say it. I hate pea gravel. That’s my rant for the night.)
So I was doing all right, standing in my knee boots, groping around under the murky water pulling and untangling long root and stem systems of these too-happy plants, when suddenly…. I felt something. Something that wasn’t right. Something that was too large to belong in our little pond with its one gallon happy plants in it. Something that felt long and nobby like a huge slimy neckbone. A monsterous, nobby, slimy neckbone.
Now, I’m not a squemish person, nor one to back down at a challenge, but this THING was so not right that I was dropping it and getting my boots out of that pond pronto. After watching to see if it had followed, and satisfied that it hadn’t taken offence, I decided on perhaps an abridged version of the ten-foot-pole ploy, and used a rake to gently heave it out of the water. It was all tangled up in my wonderful waterlily leaves, so I tried to untangle as gently as I could, crooning soothingly to it as I worked. Then, to my horror, I discovered that …. the monster neck WAS my sweet little waterlily! How could that have happened? In only three years!
The one gallon black plastic pot had apparently fallen over (thank you, racoonies), and this plant wasn’t going to wimp out like the lotus. Ohhhh no. It grew out of the pot and made a U-turn heading back towards the light. The neck was about 3 inches in diameter, about the size of a human’s, I’m guessing, but more alien. Observing the true underwater nature of my waterlily made me feel like Rosemary of Rosemary’s Baby fame: my little darling was a slimy hideous monster. So, I did the only rational thing I could think of. I shoved the whole darn thing back into the pond, prodded it with the rake (the plant grabbed the tines, I know it did!) until I couldn’t see it anymore (the arch of the neck kept protruding from the water surface! I had to almost beat it underwater). Then I went in the house and had a hot bath to get the slime and smell off of me, and try to recooperate. You bet I locked the doors.
In conclusion, the invasive pond plants were ripped out, I exchanged some water to help keep the biomass alive, and I learned something about myself. I’m not afraid of black widow spiders, snakes, heights, caves, or blood. I am, however, afraid of two things. One has been a long-standing fear of high-school-aged students, dating back to before I even was one, and I don’t think anyone will challenge me on that one. The other thing I’m afraid of is that waterlily in my pond. Its been several years now since this incident, and under the water its been growing… growing…. I haven’t waded back in there since.
