Here are some pond adjacent projects we’ve been hard at work taking care of; these are things that either had to wait until the pond was finally finished and/or are geographically near the pond area.

Fork Landscaping

For years, we’ve discussed ideas for landscaping the area at the fork in the driveways. The driveway to the house turns off to the left, and the driveway to the Morton carries on straight with a slight veer to the right. The area in between has always looked like it needed something.

We wanted a feature that would help mark our driveways’ boundaries—which would help us with snow removal in the winter—, but we also wanted something that would catch the eye of visitors and tell them which way to go to get to the house if they’d never been there before. We also wanted something that was low to no maintenance and would last forever. As you can tell, we have more than a lifetime’s worth of projects to carry out, so we want to do something once and move on.

Once I had come up with the perfect plan, I had pieced it together into gifts over the course of a year or two, and we finally implemented said plan: a rock feature with giant boulders and a custom steel address sign. To simplify the visual, a giant pile of rocks would definitively mark our path for winter snow removal, it would last forever without us having to do anything to it, and we’d make it look like it always belonged there. By adding the address sign onto the face of the largest boulder, it would help direct visitors over to the left driveway, where our house will eventually go.

Being so near the pond, this big little project had to wait until the pond rehab and dam repair was nearly complete, as the spot we had chosen for those boulders was also the spot our excavator had chosen to park his bulldozer throughout the repair. Prior to that, a giant pile of downed trees sat upon the same location. But alas, the time had come to lay out our beloved landscape fabric—which we still had left over from the culvert creek beds and Morton trench repair—and have those boulders delivered. We started with one massive one which weighed approximately two tons; then, we anchored it and framed the flat face with two smaller boulders, one on each side. Even the smaller boulders are huge, but they’re dwarfed by the center showpiece.

As with our other rock projects, we continued out from there with smaller boulders and cobblestone to finish the feature. We have also since seeded native grasses and wildflowers around the rock pile to both highlight the centerpiece but also help it to blend in at the same time. The back side of the largest boulder is flat and sloped and makes the perfect sitting spot to look over the pond.

We added all the rocks from our son’s treasure hunts that had accumulated around our ‘rock tree,’ which was serendipitously less than 15 feet from this very spot! The last finishing touch will be to drill the face of the centerpiece boulder to mount the steel address plate, and we’ll call another project complete.

Rocking the Pipes

I wish that was some cool euphemism for learning how to play bagpipes or something, but in my case, it’s most definitely nothing of the sort. A revelation that emerged shortly after the pond rehab and dam repair was the fact that all three corners of our triangular pond had some sort of drain either emptying into or draining away from the pond. For now, and for quite some time in the future, our pond will simply fill, but eventually, the drains from which the pond water will escape will have heavy water flow. We want to prevent the kind of erosion we just spent time and money fixing, so we knew we wanted to fabric and rock these areas, just as we had around the culvert tubes and along the side of our Morton.

Remember what the main pond drain looked like at the beginning? Then we had a large boulder placed on the pond side of it to disguise it from the future house? Here’s a reminder.

That boulder is massive. It’s also uniquely shaped. Although it looks like it’s leaning forward, it has a large “belly” on the front side and a wide base. It couldn’t be budged by hand; it was rock-solid (pun intended). Now, with all that being said, it was no match for our crazy summer rainstorms. We didn’t yet have any vegetation around the banks to slow the flow of water, so after a couple of these storms, this is what we found:

So, I did what I always do, and I jerry-rigged a solution. The same come along winch we used to get the fire ring across a huge ravine at the very beginning of our time at the land and move that other boulder into place came in handy again here. We used it to get this boulder to stand upright again.

After we had the boulder winched upright, we first laid some additional fabric down in front of the boulder to try to keep it—and us—out of the mud. Then, we placed two large (but smaller) boulders in front to support its weight, along with several smaller cobblestone rocks for additional stability. When we released the come along, the boulder was sturdier than ever. While we were at it, I continued around the back, placing pea gravel around the drain, followed by more cobblestone and boulders. We want to keep vegetation from growing up and around the drain, which could eventually clog it. We also wanted rock around the drain to help keep leaves and twigs away from it once the pond is full. All the rock will help keep dirt and prairie seed from washing off the bank around the drain, and it also serves as a clearing where we will be able to service, clean, and repair the main drain as necessary.

We then turned our attention to the other drainage areas. We want the dirt around the drains to stay put and not erode around them, so again, we laid out and secured our fabric and placed boulders and rock over the top.

Guardrail

The experts kept telling us we’d want a barrier on the sides of the dam/driveway. We kept telling them, “No.” That is, until the dam was finally finished, and it was several feet higher than it was before we started. We began agreeing with the experts. We don’t want anyone (us, new drivers, old drivers, or the UPS delivery person) sliding off the dam in the winter and plunging into the pond. One expert kept suggesting a fence, but we weren’t keen on blocking our view of the pond or the future prairie on the other side of the dam. So—once again—I began my late night internet searches for a solution.

I wanted something low that wouldn’t impinge upon the views but would still provide a barrier between the driveway and the substantial depths below on either side. I kept coming back to a guardrail of some sort. You know, those barriers along curves on highways? But aesthetically, I kept envisioning the galvanized metal rails with black and yellow reflective tape. That also wasn’t really the look for which we were going either. Finally, I stumbled upon the solution: a wooden guardrail! Apparently, a lot of national parks use a type of wooden guardrail within their parks to blend in better with the natural surroundings. We wouldn’t need anything that beefy, though. We don’t need this guardrail to keep us on the road going speeds of 55 mph; we’re talking more like 5-10 mph.

I found a company that makes wooden guardrails for just that purpose: residential roads and driveways up to 25 mph. Perfect! We got a quote and found a local company who would be willing to do the installation. Once we got the final measurements, we ordered the railings. Although the dam was packed down as much as possible during the repair, the formerly broken area was now fill. This means that it will likely settle to some degree as it undergoes more use and is exposed to inclement weather in all four seasons. Because of that, our excavator had built in a hump into the center of the dam to accommodate for the future settling, so the top of the dam would eventually be flat and level. With the ground still barren, it seemed the perfect time to move forward with the guardrail.

Our builder made a few final tweaks to the width and slope of the turnoff onto the dam in order to accommodate future construction vehicles (concrete pump trucks), and then the guardrail was installed.

I found a special stain intended for use on pressure treated lumber, so we’ll tackle that project in the spring and show you the finished, finished guardrail then.

Driveway Two Completion

With the builder happy with the transition onto the dam and the guardrail installed along both edges, it was finally time to finish driveway #2. The surface was topped off with several inches of road gravel and packed down as much as possible. The weather and our vehicles will continue packing it down over the next several months. We’ll regularly regrade it to maintain a crown and repair ruts. Hopefully, thick prairie will grow on either side of the new driveway, reducing runoff and erosion down the steep sides of the dam and further protecting the path to our future home.

For those of you who may have forgotten how far we’ve come, here’s a flashback photo from a similar vantage point less than a year ago.

Micro-orchard sneak peek

The low-lying area on the back side of the dam is where all the silt that was removed from the pond is currently sitting. Because of the sheer volume of silt, our excavator estimated it would take three years to “cure.” Curing is the process by which silt undergoes numerous freeze-thaw cycles and dries out, transforming into incredibly fertile topsoil. That huge basin full of silt will be a resource we continually tap when starting our large garden and food crops, but it will also serve as the location for our micro-orchard. We’d been searching for a location to house a handful of apple and pear trees for our homestead, and we finally decided to look no further!

This area will be extremely fertile because of all the silt that was dumped there. It also is cleared, free from trees, and in full sun. It is close to the house and also close to a water source (the pond). We’ve decided on McIntosh Apple trees as they’re resistant to cedar apple rust (CAR)—a fungus common on eastern redcedar affecting susceptible apple varieties and their fruit. Not only would it be impractical to try to eradicate the juniper trees on our property, it would be an exercise in futility because the fungal spores can travel up to two miles anyway. Our solution was to pick apple varieties that are resistant to the fungus. We also wanted multipurpose apples that are good for baking, storing, and eating raw.

We might even go crazy and do a couple stone fruit trees too—like peaches, and we’re toying with growing pawpaw just to make you have to go look something up. We plan to start our micro orchard soon, so the trees will bear fruit by the time we’re living on the property. We have quite a bit of work to do in that basin over the next couple growing seasons, but we’ll keep you posted on the micro orchard progress as we go.

Trees, trees, and more trees

Remember those seven maples we planted last fall? Our builder laughed at us, saying, “What, you don’t have enough trees?!” Our answer: “No, we don’t.” We don’t have enough trees; it’s never enough! Yes, we’ve had to take out some trees for the driveways, Morton, pond, and house, but we don’t see any reason why we can’t put a few back.

During late summer/early fall, we decided on three more sugar maples near some of the maples we planted the prior year. We also decided to put five new oaks in the future front yard—all different varieties. When we finally made it over the broken dam to the house site, we looked at it with a very discerning eye. We removed all the dead and poorly trees and decided we should start a few of the next generation of trees now. That area will be ‘the view’ from the house, so we want that view to be breathtaking now and always.

We weren’t sure if our deer population would be as interested in snacking on the new oaks as they were on snacking on the sugar maples, but we were not willing to find out. After planting, mulching, and watering the new trees, we installed the trunk guards and our patented cages with doors to climb in for regular waterings. Come to think of it, they’re not patented, but perhaps that’s something I should look into… Anyway, we’re calling this another project complete.

The area pictured above was a place contractors repeatedly parked their trucks and/or put piles of downed trees despite our protests, so no more! We also seeded the exposed dirt with annual rye in the fall and over-seeded it again with our prairie mixes in the winter.

Then came several new oaks in the front yard.

A couple months later, we had a beautiful pin oak tree spaded between the northern red oak and the white oak, which was a very cool process.

Seed, seed, and more seed

The pond and dam work were completed in late summer, so it was not a great time to seed. We stabilized the pond’s banks with annual rye, but we needed to save all our prairie seed until the optimal dormant seeding window opened up. After mid-November, before a snow, is the perfect time to broadcast seed everywhere we had exposed ground around the pond. We waited and waited for the perfect conditions, which didn’t come until 2025. With an expected snow storm or two in the near forecast, we rang in the new year by tossing a small fortune’s worth of seed all over the exposed dirt surrounding the pond.

We threw a savanna/woodland’s edge mix down in the front yard, among the oaks and hickories. We threw our water’s edge mix around the pond’s banks above the waterline and covered it with jute blankets; we even added a shady mix enhancement on the southern bank, as that side receives very little sun. We seeded the back side of the dam and low-lying basin containing all the pond’s silt with a classic tall grass prairie mix, as that area is wide open and in full sun. And we also seeded around the sediment basin structure which is located upstream of the pond. The excavator cleared a huge area in order to build that structure, and we wanted to stabilize it as quickly as possible. In that area, we used the wetland/water’s edge mix, the savanna/woodlands edge mix, and the classic tall grass prairie mix. We hit that area hard with all three types of mixes because the light and moisture conditions around that sediment basin are highly variable.

A while back, I said something to the effect of: if the land is the patient, our prescription is plants. We’re treating the whole area around our pond and future house with loads and loads of plants. We want to keep the invasive weeds out of the freshly disturbed dirt, we want to stabilize the ground and reduce the erosion potential, we want to pull pollutants out of the waterways, we want to attract and house wildlife of all kinds, and we want to beautify our property, especially in the areas we will be living amongst and seeing the most.

While it might not look like much now, many of those seeds will germinate come spring. We plan to do our regular mowings through the first three years, keeping the overall height to around 6 inches. That helps suppress the weed populations, but it also allows the slower growing forb species a chance to compete for light and moisture instead of getting choked out by the faster growing grasses. This will give us the most diverse prairie stand possible, with the most wonderful pops of color from a whole host of different flowers after the first few years. We will definitely provide updates over time, so you can see the progress our prairie is making!

We have several more projects in the works, like more brush clearing and prairie establishment. We also have been working on an incredible rainwater collection system and another dry creek bed. Stay tuned for lots more updates.