The Third Year: Continued

Although we had seen some evidence the previous year that the pond stressed during the late Summer we learned more about the life cycle in a pond and realized that at some times during the year we would need to supplement oxygenation of the water. I had been trying to get Bill to build a waterfall from the first day, and in May of 2003 he agreed. The metal building is on the North side of the pond, and his water well is on the North side of that. He had the pipe coming out of the well, over the roof of the metal building and hanging out over the pond. (Visible in some pictures, very little of the water was aerated.) Our original plan was very ambitious and involved rocking the entire side of the shop with the large white caliche rocks, then creating ledges into a sluce-way that would run into the pond. In the end that would have taken too long to complete so we used my rock collection and made a much smaller version. I have studied and been interested in Geology for most of my life, and all of the rocks in the water fall were collected during the past 30 years throughout the Western United States. We will eventually use plants to cover the rest of the building. We switched over completely to the water fall fill system by the end of May.