January 2019--A Bit of Winter and a Brace of Mergansers

Mid-afternoon on the 15th of the month, we watched a pair of hooded mergansers feeding in the shallows of the Pond where it empties into the Creek.  

Hooded mergansers. 

What shall we call all these things? Duck? Merganser? Nasal septum? Card catalogue? Ebola? New Brunswick? Jehovah? Jell-O? 

Words become terms, and with these we name our world and ourselves. But the world does not come new out of the box with terms and labels, nor with instructions for use or assembly. No phone number for tech support. No return address. In fact, the gift we unpack every time we see into the natural world was not a gift sent to us. We, too, are the natural world, seeing ourselves, seeing other parts of the world, and working to make some "sense" of it all before we die.

When we enroll in a biology or geology or astronomy class, we learn a new language used to describe the salamanders, fungi, layers of stone, or colors of the nebulae.  The definitions are the class. And in naming the world, we understand it; and in understanding it, we name it. 

So what is a "pond" and a "lake"?  What is a "stream," "creek," "river"?  Limnologists (the luckiest ones of us whose official job it is to study creeks and ponds) have proposed a number of definitions.  Here's a copy-and-paste job from Wikipedia featuring just the beginning of a discussion on what a pond is and then the distinctions between ponds and lakes:

... 'bodies of water where light penetrates to the bottom of the waterbody,' 'bodies of water shallow enough for rooted water plants to grow throughout,' and 'bodies of water which lack wave action on the shoreline.' Each of these definitions has met with resistance or disapproval, as the defining characteristics are each difficult to measure or verify. Accordingly, some organizations and researchers have settled on technical definitions of pond and lake that rely on size alone.

Even among organizations and researchers who distinguish lakes from ponds by size alone, there is no universally recognised standard for the maximum size of a pond. The international Ramsar wetland convention sets the upper limit for pond size as 8 hectares (20 acres), but biologists have not universally adopted this convention. Researchers for the British charity Pond Conservation have defined a pond to be 'a man-made or natural waterbody that is between 1 m2 and 20,000 m2 in area (2 ha or ~5 acres), which holds water for four months of the year or more.' Other European biologists have set the upper size limit at 5 ha (12 acres).

In practice, a body of water is called a pond or a lake on an individual basis, as conventions change from place to place and over time. In North America, even larger bodies of water have been called ponds; for example, Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts measures 61 acres (25 ha), nearby Spot Pond is 340 acres (140 ha), while in between is Crystal Lake at 33 acres (13 ha). There are numerous examples in other states of bodies of water less than 10 acres (4.0 ha) being called lakes. As the case of Crystal Lake shows, marketing purposes may be the driving factor behind the categorization....

...Pond usually implies a quite small body of water, generally smaller than one would require a boat to cross. Another definition is that a pond is a body of water where even its deepest areas are reached by sunlight or where a human can walk across the entire body of water without being submerged. In some dialects of English, pond normally refers to small artificially created bodies of water. Some regions of the United States define a pond as a body of water with a surface area of less than 10 acres (4.0 ha). Minnesota, known as the 'land of 10,000 lakes' is commonly said to distinguish lakes from ponds, bogs and other water features by this definition,but also says that a lake is distinguished primarily by wave action reaching the shore."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pond#Technical_definitions)

The word "pond" is related to the word "pound," meaning a confining enclosure, as in a dog pound or a compound.  The idea is that water can be enclosed in a pond. (It's probably not related to "pound" as in a weight of something.  This "pound" is related to "ponder" which is what we do when we "weigh" an idea.  That being said, we might consider coining a new definition of "ponder": to reflect on the waters of a pond.)

Another word that I like is exorheic (from Gk. exos, outside and rhein, to flow).  (Pronounce it like the first part of exorcist and then add on hee-ick, the way a hick might say hick.) So, ours is an exorheic pond because it empties into The Creek. Exorheic ponds are "open" ponds.  If it didn't empty into The Creek, then it would be an endoheric, or closed, pond.

The Pond is about 670' by 110'.  "About" is a good word because the width of this long pond varies.  But when I've measured it, I've calculate its square footage to be about 63,000, making this pond about 1.44 acres.  By contrast, our Pool in The Creek occupies about 2000 square feet of water surface space, the equivalent of 0.04591368 of an acre, or about 31 times smaller than the Pond. So we don't call the Pond a lake, and we don't call the Pool a pond.   The Pond is about 670 feet long ("about" because it's hard to know where to distinguish a widening Creek at the north end of the Pond and where to distinguish a narrowing of the Pond at its south end).  By way of comparison, the nose of George Washington at Mt Rushmore is 21 feet long; thus, laid end to end, we could line up 32 floating replicas of our first president's stony noses out in the Pond.  The Golden Gate bridge is 8,980 feet across, so we can assume it would span the Pond if needed (at least 13 Ponds could fit, end to end, under the span of the Golden Gate bridge).


Now, unrelated except for the water we pump out of The Creek, here is a short video of something I've found to be good.  

So this is a way to take little 6" tomato plants we got started in pots a couple months ago and now transplant them into empty feed sacks.  The plastic feed sacks that once held hen scratch or sheep and goat pellets are filled up a bit with a planting medium (I'm using about two thirds of our compost and about a third peat moss.  Mix this up in a wheelbarrow and add some slow-release fertilizer for kicks.)  Once the plant grows taller, more growing medium is added to the sack, and the sides extended upward.  Tomatoes will keep throwing out roots along its stem as long as soil is there.  So when the plant reaches a couple feet in height, it will have roots all along the way, soaking up feed and water.  And the whole thing is portable.  They can stay in this greenhouse for now, and then when other folks are setting out dinky little six- or eight-inch tomatoes in March or early April, we'll be setting out three-foot high plants into deep holes (with sacks then slit open along their sides so roots can tap into surrounding soil).  

A couple notes on the video.  The wooden enclosure to the right of the wheelbarrow is a compost pile we started within the greenhouse itself.  This way the heat (up to 145 degrees) generated by the composting process can help warm the greenhouse.  Right behind the wheelbarrow is a huge tomato plant (yellow cherry tomatoes) reaching up to the ceiling and then pouring back down again.  It was planted over a year ago and survived last summer and fall, and it now producing sweet little fruits.

Again, this video was made in mid-January in central Texas, so it's not terribly cold except on occasion.  When it does get cold, the temperature can drop into the teens and kill tomatoes even a greenhouse if there's not supplemental heat.  So people around here often wait until about the first of April to set out tomato plants just to be safe.  But then comes the heat.  By the end of May, we can be up into the hundreds, effectively bringing an end to healthy tomato plant growth and production.  Sure, we'll still pick tomatoes up until the middle of the summer, but the heat can be tough on the plants.  That's why extending the season by way of this double-transplanting method may be a good solution.  And the solution is to transplant really big and mature tomato plants and take full advantage of optimal outdoor temperatures in April and May.  Get those plants producing fruit earlier and longer.

And The Creek agrees.

Adding compost/peat moss 

Lining up newly transplanted tomatoes  

June and July 2014

Morning of June 10, not long after a rood rise on the Creek,
as evidenced by the fine drift-log on the boulder.

Damsel.

Incomplete clutch of turkey eggs found between gate
and house. Three days later, they were gone.

Juvenile red-shoulder hawk at the edge of its nest (June 10). 

  A couple days later on June 12 a nice storm tore of the tops of many cedar elm trees, but not this one. The hawks never returned, though.

  Beneath the nest, I found these items:

Red-shouldered hawk kitchen midden.

Toppled over in the July 12 storm

Dogs' graves beneath the fallen elm.

June 13 after a fair rain and wind.

Field leading up to our place. Most beautiful field in the world.

Turkey chick ("Tennessee") among chicken chicks.

First week of June harvest from the greenhouse

Heirloom. June 6.

Fresh from the terraced pesto garden against the hill.

Dead. Desiccated. And still beautiful.

  Now for a short button-bush series:

May Day: Horse-crippler Cactus, Agave, the Greenhouse, and Others

     These first two images show one of our favorite plants of all time: the horse-crippler cactus (Echinocactus texensis), also called pincushion-cactus or devil's footstool. Blooming season lasts only a few days, but spine season is perennial. I've read that it takes twenty to forty years of growth before one of these will put forth flowers. Skeptical, but provisionally amazed.  Skunks, coyotes, pigs, and very hungry people enjoy the fruits that will be forming here shortly.  
     Harvester ants also enjoy the fruits. And I love harvester ants about as much as anything else that lives. I watched the workings of our biggest harvester ant colony yesterday. It's over next to the second gate coming in our place. I'm telling you where it is because either you don't also like harvester ants--in which case you've probably never been down into this little place in the Creek's canyon--or you do like harvester ants and you won't be inclined to disturb them. Anyhow, they've increased the size of the main opening in the ground, and their population doesn't appear to have suffered any loss. The world is good when harvester ants abound. Now I'm thinking about transplanting one horse-crippler over to their yard. All things stinging and poking are fine by me.
     I've included the second photo of the horse-crippler just to emphasize two things. One, the obvious, is the beauty of these spines. But I've also included it here to say something about our drought. Weather people are telling us that we just enjoyed the third driest winter on record for central Texas, with only about an inch and a half of rain. Yet the flesh of this crippler cactus remains healthy. In drier seasons, the down-curved spines will be tilted upward as the flesh dries and shrinks.  

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     And a few more greenhouse images. We've been pleasantly surprised with the growth of plants inside. Certainly we wouldn't have such a mature stand of vegetables if we had tried to grow them in our many spring freezes and in this drought. Within a couple weeks' time we had freezing mornings and then afternoons in the upper nineties. As long as the thermostat kicks on and the two fans blow cool air from off the floor up into the hanging tomatoes and then out the north end of the house, the temperature inside feels comfortable, even on hot days.

     Vegetables grow down either side of the central walkway, trying to fill out the four-by-thirty-foot beds: pimiento peppers, spinach, basil, pole beans, cucumbers, beets (for their leaves, primarily), onions, broccoli (mainly for its leaves in salads), mustard greens, yellow squash, watermelon, cantaloup, poblano chilies, and tomatoes (about sixteen hanging baskets of small tomatoes, and about eight different heirloom varieties planted directly in the beds). 

     I'll never again underestimate the provisions of a small area.  Every day I eat two large salads (primarily from spinach, onions, beet leaves, and broccoli leaves). Next year we should have plenty of tomatoes about this time since we'll be able to start them so much earlier than we did this first year. 

     As seen in the bottom of the greenhouse photographs below, we've fenced in another area at the entrance to the house, and in it we've planted two four-by-eight-foot beds of flowers.

(the cameraman is tilted rightward, not the greenhouse)

Some interesting patterns on these nice agave plants.

     As the leaves of the agave are just starting to grow, they are compacted close to one another, leaving the imprint of each other on the broad side of the leaf.

     The plant is also known as mezcal or mescal, lending its name to the Mescalaro Apaches, who depended largely on the agave for food, medicine, and material for making such things as rope.

     Agaves will flower themselves to death.  What they'll do is spend ten, twenty, thirty, or more years building up great amounts of sugary starch in their heart, and when this has reached sufficient quantity, either Man will tap into it for the making of a fun beverage, or the plant will use this concentrated energy to produce its one great flowering act: an ungainly-sized inflorescence on a ridiculously tall stem. And die. I love this idea.

hijo

     But clones of this dead agave will live on in their hijos, or sons. These are the little pups that grow up around the parent plant. I moved half of dozen of these over to the south side of our house where summer sunshine kills everything else. These hijos will themselves continue to reproduce little clones, so that the original plant is said to live for centuries. The century plant.

     We've read of many people cutting off the leaves and then roasting and eating the remaining "pineapple" that can weigh as much as a fair-sized child.  Tequila, sadly enough, is made only from the species Agave tequilana grown near the Mexican town of Tequila in Jalisco.  We'd gladly experiment with ours did we not know that some varieties of agave have been used as arrow poison and fish poison and can cause severe skin deterioration. Ironically, some species make a respectable soap. Fiber from the leaves of Agave sisalana is the source of sisal rope. Soap-on-a-rope. And a hangover.

     Oh, and it looks like about half of the blackberry crop has withered off. I don't know if a late frost got the last half of the white blossoms or if the dry weather burned them off. Anyhow, one day I turned around and saw that there were no white flowers on the hundred feet of blackberries. Yesterday I saw many stunted green berries and many brown and crispy once-was flower heads. I drug a hose and pumped pond water on their roots, but the timing may be a bit late.

     Might ought to add that the shrinking Pond no longer flows directly into the Creek, but underground first. This is a blog about a creek.

Spring 2014

  This one below is the only Creek photo for this entry. But The Creek is moving nicely and supports plenty of fish, frogs, snails, clams, algae, turtles, larvae, and the rest.
  The remainder of the photos focus on life a bit farther up the hill, including a turkey that walked into the yard yesterday noon.

Beaver trail leading out of the Pond, up across
the small trail, and to the oaks and cedar cut down.

The first mulberry I've seen. Barely more than a
sapling growing near the Beaver Trail.

Always look forward to buckeye in bloom.

Invasive beauty. Chinaberry.