Build It and They Will Come

 Well, we built a bayou and one swamp critter came. What's next, I wonder?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great Pond (Bayou??) Project

Our farm pond turned into a swamp, full of cattails and invasive yellow iris, among other things. What was missing this dry summer was water. So Johnny decided to do something about it, since we irrigate the garden from "the pond". Or try to.

Never to do anything halfway, he borrowed a friend's big excavator and persuaded his nephew to fly here from Illinois to operate it. Jeff is a jack of many trades, including an experienced big equipment operator, and has done many pond projects. And so he arrived August 24 and dug right in, so to speak.

 Before Jeff arrived, Johnny had done a ton of preparatory work to divert the water. The pipe in the above photo ran all the way from upstream, where Johnny had built a temporary dam to hold the water and put in a pump so I could irrigate from there. The pipe drained the water through the dam and out the downstream side.

The pond gunk was dumped into a kind neighbor's trailer and hauled down to a lower field to dry out and, hopefully, kill all the invasive plants. 

 Here is the dam and little pool that I irrigated from. The pipe you can see in the first photo ran all the way out of this pool through the swamp and dam and out the downstream side of the dam.

 

 Two days after starting the project, Jeff was done with the pond. He spent the weekend at the music festival nearby. Then moved the equipment to the culvert under our driveway. The culvert was 3/4 full of sand and gravel. Johnny wanted it cleaned out before the rains arrive. So Jeff dug what he could with the big excavator and Johnny hauled off the leavings.

Happy with their completed project, Johnny and Jeff

Jeff flew back to Illinois one week after arriving. Johnny spent the next two weeks trying to get the two-foot deep gunk inside the culvert, where the excavator could not reach, cleaned out. He had lots of work-saving ideas but what ultimately worked was lowly hand tools like hoe and shovel while lying on his belly on long boards laid from bank to bank. Once pulled out with hoe, he shoveled the sand/gravel/dirt mix onto the banks. He had to get creative to remove two big branches in the center of the 20 foot long culvert. The culvert still has sand/pebbles on the bottom third, and in the middle since his hoe couldn't reach that far, but hopefully more will wash out with a heavy rain now that it has an excavator dug hole to flow into.

 

Above is his work platform on the downstream end of the culvert. The water was too deep here to stand in and clean out the culvert so he had to lie on those boards and reach into the culvert with his hoe.

Below is his work platform on the upstream end. The upstream section has a rock bottom so he could stand on the bottom and lay over the one board to clean out the culvert.

 

The water trickles slowly in from the narrow upstream section of the creek, on the right in the photo below..

After Johnny removed his drainage pipe, the pond filled, but not to overflowing, since the earth was very thirsty and soaked up the creek water, plus there is a leak beside the dam that lets water continue to flow into the creek below the dam. But I was again able to pump from the almost-full pond... with a brand new pump Johnny installed. And then we waited for the rains to arrive, fill the pond, and wash everything floating on the pond over the dam and downstream...

 

 

 

But the ground eventually soaked up all the water it wanted, apparently, as the dam began to overflow just a little, enough to wash downstream the gunk that had formed atop the water. It was beginning to look like a pond! There is still a huge area of cattails and sedges and, alas, parrot feather... making it look more like a southern bayou than a northern pond. 

Who knows what critters may be attracted to this bayou of Oregon?  Let the rains begin!