Starting to Work on the Pond...

I spent the evening last night riding part of the property on the UTV with the hubby.  Ival has a route he travels with buckets of water for all the things he's planted.  We have trees, ferns, flowers, and bushes mixed in with all the natural habitat.  He's taken lots of starts out of our yard and transplanted them to the property.  It looks like deer have been eating some of the leaves off the smaller tree starts we've put in.  We don't mind.  Since we have no well yet, they all have to be watered by hand.  He loves doing it right now but I have a feeling it may start getting old about the end of July.  Lots of the grasses from the reseeding after the fire are up about 8 inches.

In about a week, we have a guy who's going to do some dirt work for us.  We're going to make the pond a little larger and deeper and put in a culvert that will drain water into an old concrete container that was put there many years ago to water livestock that has grazed on the property for a long time.  I'm concerned about all the frogs that live in the pond - and we now have polliwogs.  But it has to be done, if we don't we'll have a huge mosquito breeding ground and nothing more.  We'll plant some fish once we find out what will do best and hopefully they'll held keep the mosquitoes down as well.

We have some natural wetlands below the pond that we'll leave as they are (taking water from the concrete container) but below that we'll have him take some of the soil from the pond and build up some pasture land on both sides of the driveway.  I have a feeling that the pasture will grow wonderfully in the old soil we dig from the pond.  We're really happy with the soil on the property.  Here in Hidden Springs, our dirt is very dense clay.  Up there it's nice rich soil with quite a bit of sand which makes it easy to dig and has great drainage.  As much as I'd like to have the pasture planted right away so that we can get horses on the property, it won't be possible until we get the well drilled.  If only we knew how deep we're going to have to go to get water.  I have a feeling it's not going to be as deep as we originally thought and that would be great.

So, for now, we do what we can afford until the house sells.  Ival spent the night in the tent as he does almost every weekend.  It's such a beautiful piece of property and we're so incredibly lucky to have it.