Waterfall Project Day Five

It’s been a week or two since we’d had a chance to get down to the waterfall to get some work done. First the rains moved in, then I started butting up against a few deadlines and Mr W headed off to help our friend Steve build some stairs. Basically, we’ve been BUSY!

But last Sunday Mr W headed down with the tractor to start mowing the field next to the waterfall. We’ve never mowed it before…mostly because we never really spent much time down there. As we work on turning it into more usable space though, we decided having some yard to run around in would be a good idea as well.

So, Mr W scouted out a patch of a few acres and headed down to mow.

Unfortunately, we’d waited too long. There was so much growth our poor little John Deere couldn’t handle it and we snapped a belt.

Drat.

Thankfully, Mr W is one of those planner types and keeps spares on hand. So as he worked to replace it, he also called our neighbor to ask him if he could brush hog that area of the field so it would be low enough to mow.

That wasn’t the only snafu of the day though. Since I hadn’t been down in a week or so, I wandered down to look around while Mr W was mowing. What was waiting for me was our once beautiful swimming hole covered in a layer of nasty brown muck.

I’d say I’m sorry I didn’t have the camera on me, but I’m not. It was flat out gross.

As it turns out, all the small sticks and leaves that had fallen into the pond during our last work day had stopped up the dam so completely that nothing could flow over it any more. There was still water escaping underneath, but the surface of the water was just sitting there…stagnant. And gross.

So I cleared out a few spaces, dragging absolutely nasty muck covered leaves and branches out of the dam and tossing it on the shore.

Two hours later, everything was beautiful again.  Lesson learned. Don’t stop up the dam.

Once we’d taken care of those issues, we still had the ever looming ginormous pile of brush to contend with. We had two different stacks of enough trees and branches to quite literally fill our bedroom.

So we gathered up all the cardboard we had in the recycle bin, and got a nice roaring fire going. Two hours worth of repositioning and shoving trees into the flames later, we had a nice little fire going.

You might also notice from the picture above that we’ve added a few solar lights down there. Five to be precise. I’ll have to snag some night time shots later when they’re actually on, but they look really pretty.

Up next…we’ll have to start tackling the underbrush on our side of the bank. There’s still a TON of work to be done before we can even think about starting to landscape. But at least the weather is getting warmer and we’ll have more opportunity to get down there.