Further Adventures With Water

                                               by Laura Crum

            This one is for those who wanted to hear about how my pool worked out over time. Those who are not interested in my little pond/natural swimming pool project had better click on the “X.” For those who haven’t read the back story, the first post is here and the second post is here.

            So it’s been almost two months since we completed the pool. And it’s been quite the saga. We had an initial couple of weeks of lovely play in the water. We even bought floating pool toys. They do not look very zen, but they are much fun to float on. As below.

            I saw a few mosquito wigglers, so bought a dozen mosquito fish and released them in the pool. Dragonflies showed up almost immediately. We began planting water plants. It was all pretty idyllic.

Eventually we managed to get the last of the water plants planted and at exactly that point the pool had its first algae bloom. Within 48 hours it went from clear and bright to murky, pea soup green. I do not exaggerate.

            Of course, we’d been warned that this would probably happen. It’s very common for new pools/ponds to experience this sort of thing before they get “in balance.” I was prepared, I thought. But it turns out that I wasn’t. Because seeing my brand new pool become a murky green swamp was very upsetting.

            The worst thing about this is there’s no simple, clear cut solution. Especially if one is not going to go the sterile, chlorinated route. Part of the reason is that there are several theories about  “algae bloom.” So I am now going to go into a rather boring discussion about algae, which will be complicated by the fact that I am no expert on the subject. But here goes.

            The kind of algae bloom that turns the water murky green is caused by single cell plankton type algae. It’s very common in a new pool, and is not the result of too much nitrate/nitrite/ammonia in the water, which is a problem that tends to happen later in the life of a pool, particularly if there are fish. These one cell plankton things proliferate early on, and the thinking seems to be that it takes awhile for the zooplankton (I think of these two as plant plankton and animal plankton) to establish themselves. Once the zooplankton become established they eat the plant plankton and the water clears. But sometimes the zooplankton die off and the water gets murky again. Nobody seems to really know why. There are many theories, and they often contradict each other.

            There are also lots of ways of dealing with an algae bloom. There are algaecides that will kill the algae and not hurt fish or water plants. But if you are trying to get a pool to be in balance, you don’t want to put poisons in it. Because the poisons would kill the water striders and the beneficial bacteria (and the zooplankton). You have to (gasp) wait patiently. It takes time. And this waiting is hard to do when the water is pea soup green.

            I tried the things that are said to be benign. Barley straw, adding beneficial bacteria, aerating the water, adding water from my established fish pond. I’m not sure if any of them helped. So I’m trying to be patient.

            Anyway, we now had murky green water, and we knew that it would take awhile to get in balance and (hopefully) be relatively clear again. Though probably never the pristine straight-from-the-tap clarity of its earliest moments.

            There was still much to enjoy about the pool—green though it was. The reflection of the full moon, for instance.

            The water lilies began to bloom. This is Splendida.

                      

            This is Commanche.

            Several people asked about the landscaping that I planned to do around the pool, and I was hesitant to answer because, in fact, I don’t intend to do any landscaping. The pool is meant to look a bit stark, like a reservoir, or a pool in a quarry. It sits in the middle of my graveled courtyard, and I intended the edges to be bare stone. The softening plants are just the water plants—reeds, rushes, cat tails, iris and water lilies, which are planted in the plant area of the pond. I like the way it looks--sort of the middle ground between formal and natural approaches.

The water gets clearer and then murkier from time to time right now. I never really know why. But I continue to get in the pool on hot days. The green water doesn’t scare me. I honestly prefer it as is to chlorinated pool water. Overall, the clarity steadily improves. At times I can even see the floor again. Still, it has a green cast at all times. But then so do most lakes that I have known.

            There is always something new. Last week we heard (and eventually saw) a frog who has taken up residence. I have no idea how he got there.

            On a less pleasant note, I discovered that one of the water lilies I planted had leeches in its pot. But I’ve been told mosquito fish will eat leeches. So here’s hoping they do, and will.

            The mosquito fish themselves are proliferating at an alarming rate. I am going to have to import something that eats mosquito fish.

            It’s all a big experiment, as I said to begin with. I would strongly encourage anyone who wishes to attempt such a project to be sure that you want a project. The pool is rather like training a horse. There’s something new to deal with every day…sometimes delightful, sometimes less so. It’s a living thing—it’s always changing.

            I love sitting by the pool on warm afternoons. I bought a little sun umbrella and I sit under it and listen to the water trickling from the fountain and find that I feel completely at peace. Sometimes I read a book. Sometimes I just sit. When I get warm enough I go in the water, which cools me right off. And then I get on the floating lounge chair and float around for awhile. It’s amazingly relaxing. That is, it’s relaxing until my husband sneaks up behind me and does a cannon ball. He’s caught both our boy and me many times when we aren’t looking. We’re getting used to it now, but initially there was always a moment of shock when we were bombed.

            And then it’s funny afterward.

            My husband makes BIG splash when he cannonballs.

            I am really enjoying the pool, but I think that a person who imagines that it is like a regular swimming pool, minus the chlorine and with a few plants added in, would be sorely disappointed in the reality. It’s more like having a farm pond. Every morning I go out and skim leaves and dead bugs off the surface and peer into the pool curiously. There’s always something to see, whether it is a new water lily (or a new bug), water that is clearer (or murkier) than the day before, or clouds whose reflections are far more intense than their actual forms in the sky. I find it very engaging in much the same way that I find the horses engaging.

            And speaking of horses, we continue to ride a couple of times a week and are also enjoying the summer with our horses. Here Sunny and Henry are ready to go…isn’t Sunny’s mane a thing of beauty?

            I love riding in the woods in the summertime. Happy Midsummer's Eve, everyone--a day late.

My New Project

                                                by Laura Crum

            As some of you know, I’ve been working pretty hard lately on a new project that isn’t horse or writing related, and today I’m going to tell the story, as a couple of you (I’m looking at you, Funder) have requested it. For the rest of you, this may be a pretty boring post.

            Long ago, when I was twenty-two, I spent a summer living by myself at a fairly remote Sierra lake, with only my young dog for company. That summer left a deep mark on me, and ever since then, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with sitting by/contemplating water. The first three houses I lived in after I graduated from college were all situated by the banks of creeks. But the property where I now live, which I call home, does not have any water within view. And it has always bugged me.

            About sixteen years ago, as I was going through a divorce and struggling with depression, I became determined to have SOME water to look at from my porch. So I dug a hole and bought a pond liner and some rocks, and voila I had a little fish pond. About seven feet long, four feet wide and four feet deep in the deepest part. I had water lilies and iris and goldfish, and for all these many years I have very much enjoyed my pond. But it wasn’t enough.

            Every year, as we took our annual road trip across the country to visit my in-laws in Michigan, we camped by and swam in natural bodies of water. Lakes, rivers, streams, reservoirs, canals. My husband’s parents live on a small lake and while we stay there, we swim every day.

            Grandma and Grandpa’s lake.

            Lake Michigan—our favorite time to swim there is sunset.

            Poudre River in Colorado—we camped there every summer for seven years in a row.

            The mighty Mississippi River—there is a house on an island that I am looking at in the photo.

            Walker River in Nevada—my husband swam in every body of water we found.

            Stanislaus River in the Sierras—very near the lake where I spent my long ago solitary summer.

            And every year, when we came home from the summer trip, I longed to have a natural body of water to sit by and get into. I had/have no interest in chlorinated traditional swimming pools or hot tubs, with their sterile, stinky water (no offense to those who like/own such things--we all have different taste). I wanted “real” living water—a waterhole in a creek would do. But though I searched all around our county, I never found anything suitable. Sure, there is Monterey Bay a couple of miles away, and we do go there, but I wanted water that was private, where I could be alone (I know, I’m a misanthrope), and I didn’t want to have to drive somewhere. I wanted to LIVE by water. Water I could contemplate and get into. But no matter how hard I thought and dreamed and schemed, I could not come up with a concept that seemed to work. For years…

            My husband and I talked of damming the seasonal creek that runs through our pasture in the Sierra foothills, but we never could figure out a plan to do this that seemed likely to succeed in creating the water hole we wanted. And in the end, we didn’t want to spend time and money building something that might not work out. Not to mention we got up to the pasture once a month at best, and sometimes it was once a year. The pasture is three hours away from our home, and we were getting burned out on the drive. So that idea eventually got discarded.

            I schemed and planned about various possible water features we could build here at home, but I couldn’t really figure out where such a thing should be or what it should look like. And then, one day, about a year ago, a whole lot of things came together in a moment of inspiration (these moments are SO MUCH fun). And finally I had a concept.

            Here I have to backtrack a moment and add that another aspect to this situation was our desire to have an emergency supply of fresh water here at home. I had been through the Loma Prieta earthquake, and, at the time, I was taking care of my uncle’s small ranch (with twenty horses in residence) while he was out of town on vacation. Since he was on a well, and the power (which ran the pump) was out for two weeks, it was incredibly helpful for me that he had a large water tank at the top of the property with the appropriate infrastructure to run it on gravity feed through the water lines when needed. Thus I was able to water the horses until the power came back on. It also wasn’t lost on me that even if the tank had not been there, Soquel Creek bordered the property on one side, and I could have led the horses there to drink once a day. It would have been a pain, but it would have worked. So it has always bugged me not to have some sort of emergency water supply here.

            Anyway, at my moment of inspiration, one of the factors in play was that my husband wanted to build a small greenhouse, and we had chosen the site. But the logical place for a water tank that could supply our property through gravity feed was above the greenhouse site, and the only way to install such a tank was to put it there before we began the greenhouse project. And so we were stalling on starting the greenhouse because neither of us could decide if we really wanted to spend the money on a water tank, and we couldn’t figure out how to effectively combine it with the existing water system. We were sort of stuck.

            And then it came to me. I could kill three (not two, THREE) birds with one stone. And suddenly I knew exactly how to do it.

            The inspiration began (get this) thanks to facebook. My friend Liann Finnerty, who is an old high school friend as well as a facebook friend, posted a photo of a natural swimming pool and a link to the site where she found it. Liann is an artist and when she mentioned that these were the swimming pools of her dreams, I took a look. And finally, finally, I got an image of the thing I wanted to make. Because two of the pools on the site (the second and third) really inspired me. Waterhouse Pools. This, I thought, just this, is what I want to do.

            But I still didn’t know where to put the thing. I walked out my backdoor, looking for an answer, and it came to me. Just outside my back door was something we referred to (rather optimistically) as “the courtyard.” The courtyard is the level area between our two small houses. It is covered in pea gravel and there are roses planted on the fences and buildings that surround it. We think it looks very pleasant and French (in a rustic haphazard American way).

            That is, it looks pleasant when it is empty. But it was almost never empty. Because it was one of the only flat places where we could park the camper and the big pickup that hauls the camper, and we used it more as part of the driveway. So my courtyard was occupied by a large, ugly white camper and a big truck. This absolutely ruined whatever beauty it had, and it bugged me every single day. It had been this way for years.

            The thing is, on the day I looked out at the courtyard searching for a place to put my pool, I was aware that we hadn’t actually USED the camper in over a year. We had used it pretty much non-stop for ten years, and we took a lot of road trips and camping trips in that time. But all three of us had gotten pretty burned out on covering highway miles and we just weren’t motivated to plan camper trips these days. For the past year and a half I had been walking around/looking at the camper/truck combo in the courtyard—to no real purpose. And I suddenly realized that if I could walk around that footprint every day of my life, I could walk around another equal footprint—the footprint of the pool. Not only would I gain a pool, but the annoying camper would be gone. AND I would have fresh water storage that was beautiful, instead of a big ugly water tank. At that moment I knew what I wanted to do, and somewhere in my heart I knew I would accomplish this.

            The very first thing I did (after I broke it to my husband what I planned to do) was put the camper in storage. Then I began parking the big pickup truck in the riding ring (a temporary measure). Now the courtyard was empty. I got some garden hose and laid it out in the footprint where the camper/truck had been. I fiddled with it until I had a rough shape for my pool. And then I spent a LOT of time looking at it and thinking about it.

            This was last summer. I contemplated my potential pool and I walked around its shape every time I crossed the courtyard. I also called Chris from the Waterhouse Pools site and asked for advice. Chris lives in New England and it wasn’t practical to have him build me a pool out here in California. He recommended a book by Michael Littlewood about natural swimming pools, which he said got him started building these pools. He told me that if I couldn’t find a natural pool builder in my area, I should look for an experienced koi pond/landscape pond builder. “It’s basically the same thing,” he said.

            I bought the book. My husband and I read it cover to cover. We learned a lot. And I began looking for natural pool builders in my area. Turns out there were no natural pool builders in my county/part of the world. Or none that I could find. The closest folks who billed themselves this way were three hours away. And they all turned out to build something very different from what I wanted. Essentially they built regular chlorinated, concrete swimming pools that were designed to “look” natural. This wasn’t what I had in mind. I wanted a pond that was meant for people to get in it, more or less. All the filtering and purifying of the water was to be done by plants and beneficial bacteria, as it is done in a balanced garden pond—or, for that matter, in any natural body of clear water.

            So I looked for a pond builder. I called quite a few. And only one was responsive and interested. And this was Tim from Pond Magic.

            Tim had never built a “natural swimming pool.” But he had built over three hundred ponds. He listened to my idea, looked at the photos on the Waterhouse website, and said that he liked the concept and didn’t see why he and his crew couldn’t build such a thing. I looked at his website and saw that he had done the sort of work building dry stone walls and placing large boulders that I was interested in doing. He borrowed our books on natural swimming pools to learn more. He reiterated that he made no claim to being a natural pool builder. I said that I would design the pool and take responsibility for it. He would just be building another pond—to my specifications. I wanted to be in charge of my own project and supervise it every step of the way. Unlike many contractors, Tim didn’t seem to have a problem with this. We agreed that we would work “time and materials” (in my view the only fair and workable way to do ANY construction project). And we set a date to build the project in the spring—six months away.

            During the six months before my planned construction date I pondered my “pool” every single day. I knew that I wanted to build it using a flexible pond liner (which was the sort of construction Tim the pond builder was most familiar with) and I wanted to line it entirely—walls, floor and rim—with natural stone. The Waterhouse Pools site had given me a visual image of a “sunken patio floor” that I wanted to do, and also a concept for a small pool that was lined by big slabs of flat rock, like something you might find in a quarry. One of my concerns was to fit this pool into our landscape in both practical and aesthetically pleasing ways. And one of the things I wanted to avoid was the “faux” natural look that I saw in most garden ponds. You know, here’s your suburban lawn and next to it is this irregular rocky little “natural” pond. Uhmm, huge clash there. My pool was to be set in a simple open, graveled site and there was no way in hell it made any kind of aesthetic sense for it to look like some kind of mini natural lake. What I thought it should look like was sort of as if people had developed a spring and made a reservoir. Or perhaps as if there had once been a quarry—I had seen many interesting pools in quarry sites.

            So this was the vision I kept in my head as I planned the pool. Something simple and clearly man-made, but very much about natural stone. As if some primitive village had developed a spring and built a reservoir… a compromise between “formal” and “natural” styles. And gradually I began to see the pool clearly in my mind.

            There were practical considerations also. The pool needed to fit into the footprint we had been walking around for years (where the camper/truck were parked). It could not impede the paths that we used every day. It would be essentially at the end of our driveway, so there needed to be some large boulders at the driveway end of the pool to prevent some idiot from driving into the water (“What, who me?” said my husband when I mentioned this). We had to come up with an effective way to hide the skimmer/pump. And we needed to decide between the various methods of filtering/pumping. We also had to figure out a design that allowed for a “wetland system” where the plants would be, and an area for people to go in the water. I wanted to have a  “deep” waterhole, where I could float. And we had to choose what sort of stone we wanted to use. There was a lot to think about.

           

            OK—this is too long and probably very boring to most people. Certainly not horse or writing related. I will finish the “pool saga” up next post—with lots of photos of the pool itself.