The Home Stretch (pool update)
About 18 inches to go
We are within sight of the end of the natural swimming pool project. We ended up washing and wheeling 60 tons of gravel, plus quite a bit of field stone to fill up the area outside of the wooden wall. This gravel gives the plants something to get their roots into as well as acting as a filter and giving the beneficial bacteria a place to colonize. We did have a little setback with the pool when we noticed that the rubber liner was begining to float. It didn't take too long to figure out that water was getting underneath the liner, probably from the gravel washing operation and off of the shed roof. I ended up having to cut a whole in the liner so that I could pump the water out from under it. I bet there was between 500 and 1000 gallons under there. I put a drain pipe set in gravel around the uphill side of the pool to catch any surface runoff headed in that direction. Then we patched the whole in the liner and quickly got the pool filled so that the weight of the water above the liner would keep much water from getting underneath.
Waterfall in the larval stage
I think all that we have left to do is put the plants in, build the fence around it (this weekend), finish hauling gravel, finish the waterfall and hook up the pump, waterfall and skimmer.
Finished Water Level
posted by Peter comly at 12:00 PM
2 Comments:
What an awesome project..I am looking forward to seeing it all planted out and the waterfall in action. That is a really cool idea!
Cool! I had debated lining our ponds but in each case lucked out and hit pockets of clay so I didn't. Still, it took a year for things to really seal up in the pond bottoms. We still get some evaporative loss which is easy to see by the way the wave erosion forms on the shore in August especially.
Over on my Sugar Mountain Farm blog on the Certified 2007 post you asked about the Certified Naturally Grown, costs and why we do it.
There is no cost with CNG. They ask for a donation of $50 but it is not required and we didn't do it the years we were just getting started, didn't have the money, etc. This year we sent them a check. They have earned it.
I wasn't kidding about the logo being better than the USDA's. It sells meat for us. It answers people's questions very quickly - Oh, Certified Naturally Grown so no anti-biotics, no added hormones, no pesticides, no herbicides, no GMOs, etc. Having that logo on our product label helps sell the meat in stores.
Go for it and spread the word. It's a good, farmer driven program that means more than government Certified Organic.
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