by Gene Logsdon
I hold my breath as a great blue heron drops out of the sky, folds its wings and begins to wade upstream on its stalky legs to do a little spear fishing with its long beak. A muskrat, poor of eyesight by nature, scrambles up on the bank under me and licks its paws. Our pet ewe, Bounce, also stops under the tree and peers querulously up at me. Humans are so weird, she baaas, and then shrugs hopelessly and goes on her way.
What I had thought was a nub of mud above the water's surface proves upon scrutiny with the binoculars to be a bullfrog nose. The rest of its body is barely discernible below the surface. I look upstream and suck in my breath again. A long-legged bird such as I have never seen before stands at the water's edge, its tail bobbing up and down in the most ludicrous manner. I leaf through the bird hook I pull from my hip pocket. Eventually I find it: a solitary sandpiper. I watch it bob, wondering if solitary sandpipers always come to our creek and only now am I discovering them, or whether the winds high in its migratory sky blew it off course.
Beyond the bobbing bird, also next to the water's edge, a wild iris is blooming all alone, almost as if someone had planted it there. A little later a doe comes mincingly from the brush to drink. She smells human danger but does not see me until I have to blink and then she glides back to where, I'm sure, a fawn is waiting. Two male bluebirds flash around a hole in a fencepost along the field in the other direction, fighting for the territory. A pair of mallards floats under me, letting the current move them. And then float by two wood ducks, surely the most beautiful of the birds. What need have I for safaris, for continent-hopping, for far-off wilderness? I have hiked the wilderness trails of the world without leaving my weeping willow.
I'm distracted by a shiny green bug on a branch. I don't know its identity. I have only a bird book and wildflower book with me. I try to memorize the bug's features and color patterns so that I can look it up when I get back to the house, but I give up. There is a limit to what one mind can hold at one time and I have long ago reached mine.
My other major reason for building a pond of my own is that I love fresh fish. Though the creek provides a few, it is not deep enough for an ample supply and there is no way to keep the fish from swimming away downstream to the river. It is possible to raise fish in cages in larger creeks, but they usually must be fed regularly and removed in winter. For a typical warmwater pond in Ohio (one not fed by cold springs), largemouth bass and channel catfish are good choices. The former will prey on its own young and not overpopulate when intensively fished. The latter generally will not reproduce in ponds. If you must stock blue gills, use only the hybrid sterile strains since regular bluegills overpopu late and the large number of fry will tend to stay too small for enjoyable fishing or efficient butchering. Grass carp (not at all like the notorious "Egyptian" carp that overpopulate our rivers) are now touted as a good pond fish, and have long been a staple in Chinese agriculture. But they eat vegetation and will not prosper if stocked at rates higher than the amount of water plants available.
If you have a stream-fed or spring-fed pond where the water stays cold enough to support trout, (an average 60 degrees Fahrenheit in summer, never above 70 degrees) that should be your fish of choice.
You can feed fish in ponds similarly to feeding hogs or chickens in the barn. Commercial feeds are on the market. The Chinese throw fresh grass in the water for grass carp-hence the name. In oriental countries (and experimentally in the Unites States, especially under the aegis of Rodale Press in Emmaus, Pennsylvania and the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale years ago), chickens or hogs are fed in pens positioned over the fish ponds. The animals grow on grain and the fish on the undigested grain in the animal manure that drops into the water.
Many techniques for raising fish as a farm product can be learned from catfish farmers and the literature thereof. But like all commercial farming enterprises, commercial catfish farms are forced, in order to make a profit, to industrialize their operations. Fish are crowded into ponds and chemicals must often be used to keep them healthy in such dense populations. While health officials say there is nothing to worry about, as they are wont to do, the cost of this high production makes those methods, in my judgment, too expensive and time-consuming for the cottage farmer.
In fact the best procedure for the cottage farmer to follow is to limit the population of fish (mainly by fishing) and let the biotic life of the pond provide all the food needed by its residents. Aim to sell just a few fish, if any. Maybe just sell fishing rights to a few acquaintances if you need to make a little money.
I have another possibility for my pond. It lies on upland pasture about a hundred feet higher than my lower fields. I contemplate siphoning the pond water in drouth seasons, onto at least the nearest of the lower fields, not only for irrigation but the plant nutrients from fish manure and rotting water plants. At the same time I would harvest the fish. When the rains came and filled the pond again, I would restock the pond. This may or may not work out in practice, but is the kind of planning that makes life on the cottage farm so interesting.
Speaking of irrigation, there is normally little need for it here in Ohio, although extra amounts of water can work wonders, as we learned in one of our wettest years ever, 1992). I am ecologically against pumping out groundwater to grow crops we already have a surplus of. But capturing surface water in a pond to be used for emergency irrigation in a drouthy summer certainly transgresses no ecological commandments, especially since the pond will be promptly replenished by fall rains.
There is a no-cost form of irrigation that all husbandmen practice in their role as waterboys of the farmsteads. When livestock drink from the creek and then urinate on the pastures, they are in a sense carrying water, not to mention fertilizer, to the fields. This is an important point. When we talk of sustainable farming, we have to remember that even in grassland farming, where all the manure is returned to the land and there is no erosion, the animal products produced by the grass are removed: the meat, the milk, the hides, the wool, the eggs, and so forth. But when animals drink from the creek and the water in them is processed into nutrient-rich urine and put on the land by the animals themselves, there is an addition of nutrient value that helps make up for the loss represented by the meat and milk. This addition, along with rain and the nitrogen that legumes transfer from the air to the soil, as well as the plant residue that the animals don't eat, represents true sustainability if not a net gain in fertility without human labor. If you have ever watched a flock of sheep in action you know the urine/water addition is quite significant-about two pints of liquid fertilizer per sheep per day, I reckon. And cows of course, are mobile fire hydrants.
Farm ponds are generally of two types. One is a hole in the ground, to describe it simply, filled with run-off water or occasionally spring water. The other employs a dam to back up run-off water moving down a waterway between hills. The first kind is simpler to build and generally more satisfactory from the standpoint of maintenance. A dammed pond must be designed so that it is capable of handling the overflow from heavy rains. Designed wrongly, the dam can be easily and quickly washed away by flooding waters. The dam also must be designed so it doesn't leak.
There are plenty of qualified dam builders around. Again, contact your local SCS office first unless you are as independent as my father, who spurned all offers of advice and built his own dam, by damn. (It leaked a little and almost washed away a couple of times.)
An in-ground pond has no dam. If the overflow pipe is too small to handle peak floods, the water just rolls on down the grassed waterway like it did before the pond was there, no sweat. You do have to figure out where you want to put the dirt from the excavation. We employed a small bulldozer and operator to dig out our hole-in-ground pond. As the bulldozer pushed the dirt up out of hole, another man operating a frontend loader transferred it on to a low mound to the southwest of the pond. The mound of dirt now acts as a windbreak against prevailing westerly breezes. Some pond builders heap this extra dirt for a grassed pr
ivacy barrier if the pond is open to public view so they can swim nude if they feel like it. Cottage farmers don't get enough subsidy payments to afford to go all the way to St. Bart's in the Caribbean like the agribusiness farmers do.
A pond in this climate should be eight feet deep in the deepest spot so that fish have a good chance to over-winter. The shoreline should slope off almost immediately to at least three feet deep to discourage growth of water weeds, although that means little children can more easily slide in and drown. You have to kind of use your head and build to your own purposes. Three generations of children have played around and fallen into my father's pond and nobody has drowned yet. My uncle, too lazy to scoop snow off the ice by hand, tried to drown a tractor in that pond once, but failed. The water was only four feet deep where he went through. Several of us have gone through the ice while playing hockey, but hockey sticks are wonderful for rescuing such idiots. Pond safety depends not so much on the depth of the water but upon how sensible children (and their parents) are. My father firmly believed that "damn fools are going to get hurt or killed no matter how hard you try to protect them." He liked to tell the story of when he was a "little shaver" and an older boy threw him in the river. "I didn't know how to swim but he told me to swim and by God, I did, too," he said.
Livestock should not be allowed to wade around in the pond. The watershed above the pond from which water drains should be in grass or woodland so that dirt does not wash in with the run-off water. If you want to understand the power of water, build a pond with a watershed of cornfields. I watched one pond so situated that filled up with silt in a decade. Of course, it made a wonderful garden after that.
Above all, a pond should not have more than seven to ten acres of watershed for every acre of pond, especially if it is a dammed pond. You might go higher than that with a properly designed (and expensive) overflow system, but the gist of the matter is that a pond doesn't need much land draining into it. I know a very nice small one that maintains its water level with little more than a barn roof for a watershed.
If you can keep that little watershed free of pesticides and heavy fertilizer applications, your pond can remain fairly clean of pollutants and your fish safe to eat. That is its advantage over a creek or river where you have no control over pollutants. Also you have little control over flooding in creeks and rivers. Larger rivers are fun for the nature lover, but a headache for farmers whose land abuts them. Even creeks like ours, which I can jump across in some places in fair weather, breaks its banks in flood time and spreads over the lowland as much as a quarter mile wide in places. No fencing that runs perpendicular to the flow of floodwater will last very long. For these spots, I use board fences that I make and remake from old, used lumber or I buy old, used board gates at farm sales and continually replace them.
I used to fret considerably (Carol says considerably is not nearly a strong enough word) over these floods, which occur nearly every winter and occasionally in summer. But in twenty years all I have lost from floods were two cuttings of hay, and they weren't really lost because I chopped the muddy remnants up with the rotary mower to serve as mulch on the field. The high water usually recedes in three days. A few times water has completely inundated corn at six inches of height, but most of the stalks recover and go on to produce a crop. I have seen flood waters creep up the stalks of ripe wheat almost to the heads, and I still harvested the crop ten days later. Each flood brings a layer of my neighbors' rich topsoil and no doubt a little of their expensive lime and fertilizer to my lower field, so in the long run I am repaid grandly for the inconvenience.
Floods provide drama to farming. People who believe life is dull out here ought to try rescuing a flock of sheep trapped in a fence corner by high water. At night. With bolts of lightning for illumination.
Wetland Marshes
Prairie potholes, oxbows, hill seeps, frog ponds, peat bogs, cattail swamps, and various other kinds of marshland can provide a farm with a fuller range of biotic life than even streams and man-made ponds do. One of the saddest sins of humanity against nature is the draining of the prairie potholes of the upper Great Plains which has been going on for a century now and probably will continue as the grain gods further drain (whoops) the wetlands law of its effectiveness.
But let me speak to what I know, on my own stomping grounds. Two hundred years ago, this part of north-central Ohio was pockmarked with bogs noted for their cranberries. Sandusky, the name of rivers, streets, towns, and cities in this area, means "water within pools" in Wyandot Indian language. The bogs must have been noted for plentiful wild game too, because around these old depressions now plowed for corn and soybeans year after year, I find many flint arrowheadstwenty-eight in an afternoon, once! I say "depressions" because that is all that remains today. Many of these depressions are so low in the landscape that they cannot be adequately drained to tile outlets, yet farmers stubbornly keep trying to farm them whenever they dry out enough to plow. The two that I have watched and studied closely for fifty years have rarely produced a profitable crop. Had they been preserved as wetlands, they would have produced more wild food from hunting, fishing, (even cranberries again?) than they have ever produced in surplus grain.
As each generation arrives with yet more powerful digging tools and money, new attempts are tried to get tile deep enough under the old bogs to drain them, and I suppose eventually someone will succeed. If so, then the dried-out, powdery-muck soil will blow away. As it is, even with all the technology thrown at these bogs, they lay under water or are totally soggy about half the time. How much saner it would have been to leave these potholes as marshland, or at least excavate them a little deeper and turn them into ponds. The ponds or marshes could have been used as tile outlets for surrounding fields at far less expense than running big eighteen- and twenty-inch tile mains twelve to fifteen feet deep for several miles to a creek to drain the old bogs. The irony of the situation is that these potholes are not protected by the new wetlands law, since they have a history of being "farmed," while the wetlands law does apply to piddly little mosquito breeding puddles that can be easily drained for decent crop production. Farmers with a "look-the-otherway" policy on the part of local officials have cleverly gotten around the law in most instances anyway. The ultimate result from a poorly written law is that in this county very few worthwhile wetlands are saved while much time and red tape (with who-knows-how-many under-the-table deals) are wasted to allow farmers to drain the wet spots that are insignificant as wetlands anyway.
The most ludicrous example occurred when the local landfill was forced, by the law, to build a "new" wetland because in the course of expansion, it had to destroy a woods with a bit of swamp in it. The spot picked for the "new" wetland was a field of prime farmland where a new and complete tile system had only recently been installed. The landfill owners had to spend thousands of dollars scooping out a shallow basin of several acres with a bulldozer, destroying the tile installation in the process, and piling the dirt into a steep hill. The hill buried several more acres of farmland and will itself be too steep for anything except a toboggan run and it will erode back into the "wetland" from now until eternity. The site of the "wetland" would have been much better used for a woodlot of valuable black walnut trees which this land was especially well suited for. And if a swamp were indeed desirable, like the one the landfill had destroyed, all that was necessary in the first place was to plug the outlet of the tile system draining the field. That would have taken ten minutes. The country is losing its common sense because pompous asses in high places will not allow local people to solve local problems in a manner practical for local situations.
We are obviously faced here with another example of socially approved insanity, and the only effective solution I know is for more cottage farmers to buy more land. I've waited a lifetime to buy the field in which one of the potholes I've described lies. I have seen what a gram of this soil looks like under an electronic microscope-a world teeming with a splendorous explosion
of technicolored microorganisms that reminded me of a tropical rainforest. I would like to turn that wetland back into a cranberry bog and duck pond and sell hunting rights, which would be a more profitable enterprise than mulishly trying to grow corn there. And I would still have the other half of the field to turn into pro ductive cropland by draining it cheaply into the bog. My chances of acquiring this land are extremely slim, but I suggest the idea in case others are faced with a similar opportunity. Such land usually sells cheap because crops fail on it and houses would sink in it.
Then again there is sometimes reason for optimism. Prosperous farmers have donated one such old bog to our village. It lies right at the town limits, and will become a demonstration wetland for all the public to watch and learn from. I am even hoping for cranberries.
A list of the possible "crops" that freshwater wetlands can grow would fill three or four chapters. But here are a few:
Cattails. The roots, or rather the rhizomes growing from the roots are delicious. I lived on them for two days while doing survival camping along a Minnesota lake when I was young and-fortunately-foolish. Moreover, scientific studies done by Dr. Leland Marsh of the State University of New York years ago indicates that an acre of cattails will produce thirty tons of flour from the rhizomes and leave enough root in the ground to provide for the next year's crop. Cattail leaves are durable enough for woven basketry. Best of all, "cattail corn," the seedheads picked green and steamed like sweet corn, is a delicacy of fancy restaurants who pay $8 a pound and up for them.