Of Ponds and Pigs and Peonies

Dawn.

When we moved here back in 2000, across the road from us (Pennsylvania Route 49 that runs from Coudersport on the west 53 miles to Lawrenceville on the east), there was a marshy field through which ran a little stream. That stream is the headwaters stream of the Middle Branch of the Genesee River, which joins the East and West Branches a few miles from here and then flows north into Lake Ontario and out the St. Lawrence River into the North Atlantic. In 2003 the beavers arrived and the transformation of that little Genesee stream began. They turned that marshy field into the best natural feature in our little village of Gold – The Beaver Pond. Over the years we have taken delight in watching the beavers enlarge the pond, extending their dam, building more dams upstream. Now there is a series of ponds, four of them, stretching from the oldest one across the road from us, half a mile to the west up to Burrell’s. Each pond has its own lodge. I assume the occupants are the offspring of the beavers in the first pond. The ponds are lovely. They add so much to our little village with their picturesque beauty and the bountiful wildlife they attract.

2003, the beavers arrive.

2003, the pond starts to grow.

2013, ten years later.

2024, this is that first pond now.

Last week, on a morning walk to Burrell’s and back, going along the road, headed west with the ponds on my left, I noted the different species I saw. I saw two does. They were on the near bank by the first pond and I startled them and they startled me. They leaped across the pond and then paused to watch me before trotting across the meadow beyond.

If you look closely, you can see one doe splashing in the pond and the other watching beyond.

I saw birds – Canada geese with their goslings, a female wood duck with ducklings, and a group of mallards. I saw red-winged blackbirds, yellow warblers, a kingfisher, eastern king birds, barn swallows, a green heron, and a great blue heron. I saw a fish splash out on in the middle of the pond. I saw a large beaver swimming back from its night’s work to the lodge. I saw butterflies and dragonflies. I heard, but didn’t see bull frogs finishing up their nightly music making. And who knows how many other forms of life there were that I couldn’t see or hear. At times we have seen bald eagles, mergansers, and other kinds of ducks there. I have seen stoats and foxes and once I saw a bobcat on the far side of the pond. There is so much life in such a small space, maybe twenty acres all together. It makes me happy.

The Gold Beaver Pond.

The season of summer company has begun. Over at the Shillig’s house, the Kuprovs – Kale and Roman and their two children Lev and Mila – arrived last Sunday evening. The Shilligs had other friends, the Sandovals, here for a visit on Tuesday through Friday. On the 25th, Geoffrey, Joni, Ellie, Gwen, and Henry are arriving at our house. The Thayns and the Fosters and our niece Kailie and her family will be here shortly after that. Others are coming later in the summer – Stacey’s sister Roxann, our niece Missy and her family, the Shillig’s daughter Kohl and her family, their son Chase and his family, and possibly others. Things will be nonstop busy here all summer long.

Monday was cool and drizzly. I didn’t get anything done in the garden. There was a lot to do, mostly weeding, and I didn’t feel like getting wet knees. I stayed indoors most of the day, a rare thing for me this time of year. I listened to music, finished the book I was reading, and relaxed. I only went out to do the morning and afternoon chores. And to get our pigs that evening.

We’ve raised pigs twice before – in 2009 and again in 2020, and each time we learned some important lessons. The first time, we kept them down in the barn. Back then, before the barn roof collapsed and was rebuilt, the chicken coop only took up one third of the barn, the section on the east. The middle third of the barn had rabbits in cages and animal feed stored on pallets. The western third was the pig pen. The lessons we learned that year were that: 1) Pigs get too big for the barn. 2) Pigs can excavate a dirt barn floor and make a pit several feet deep. 3) When it rains, that pit will fill with water to create an indoor pond. 4) The mud, manure, and food debris make a terrible reeking mess. 5) That mess attracts rats. Those were hard lessons and we did not repeat our mistakes.

2009, pigs in the barn with Daniel.

The second time we raised pigs, we made a pen for them in an abandoned vegetable garden at the bottom of the orchard. We made a sturdy wooden fence to hold them in. Our friends the Joneses gave us a real feeder and waterer instead of the makeshift ones we used the first time. Things went a lot better that time. But the pig pen was a little too close to the house. On a warm day with the prevailing breeze blowing, the smell was sometimes a bit too intense in the inhabited parts of the property.

2020, the pen in the orchard.

Some cute pig admirers.

This time, our third time, we built a pen out of wire pig panels way out at the bottom of the big garden. The smell, if the winds blow from the usual direction, will not reach us. Stacey and I drove out to Dan Miller’s farm up in Bingham Township on Monday evening. We wanted three pigs, but he was only able to get us two. He said to check again in a week or so as he might be able to get another. We brought them home and put them in their pen. They are a gilt (a young female) and a barrow (a young castrated male).They seemed to like their new home right away. They walked around eating grass and sampling other herbal delicacies they could find. By nightfall they’d figured out how to push the lid on the their feed bin open and eat. It took them longer to figure out how to operate the water nozzle, but they figured it out eventually. I stood and watched them until it started to get dark, hoping they’d settle in and be safe. Kurt said he’d go out at midnight to check on them. I set an alarm for 2:00 to take my turn.

Our new pigs.

Exploring their new home.

The world is strange at 2:00 in the morning. When the alarm woke me, I dressed and put on a headlamp and headed out to the pig pen. It was very dark and, despite my familiarity with every inch of this place, it had an air of mystery about it. As I stepped onto the back porch, the fragrance of the potted lilies on the steps greeted me. I took a deep breath and headed into the dark. It was 49° and misty. The mist swirled in the beam of my headlamp. There were fireflies in the orchard as I walked the path out to the big garden. The air out in the garden was sweet with the scent of the old mock orange bush that grows in the lilac hedge there. I looked into the pig pen. The pigs were buried deep in the straw in their shelter, sound asleep. I made my way back through the mist and went back to bed. But I didn’t fall back to sleep for a while. Thoughts of pig possibilities swarmed in my head. Finally at 3:00 I slept again.

So the pigs have settled into their new life here. My morning chores now include giving the chickens and the pigs their breakfast. I do the chickens first. They are always anxiously awaiting my arrival at the barn. The pigs sleep in later. So I go to the barn, feed the chickens, come back to the house, fill the bird feeders, and then tend to the pigs. I make them a warm breakfast. I crack eggs into a bucket with some warm water in it, then I carry that out to the high tunnel where we keep their food. I mix their dry food into the bucket and stir it into a wet mash that I dump into the pan in their pen. They are usually still in their bed in the straw when I do that. When they hear me coming, they hurry out to meet me. They can lick that pan clean in about five minutes. Sometimes they get treats – old food from our food storage, table scraps, and tasty weeds from the garden like pigweed (obviously) and purslane. It’s fun watching the pigs. I go out several times a day and visit with them. They spend their day eating, napping, and digging in the dirt. I guess in many ways, I’m a bit porcine myself because that pretty much describes my average day too.

A pan of pig breakfast.

On Wednesday, after two overcast days, the weather cleared. The sunrise that morning was very pretty. After the morning chores, when the dew had dried, I went out to weed. We’d neglected the onion and garlic row out in the big garden and it was very weedy. Onions and garlic don’t like to compete with weeds. I spent several hours on my hands and knees carefully pulling weeds in the onion row. After she got home, Stacey helped me weed the garlic.

Thursday was a glorious day. It was sunny and warm and still and fragrant. It felt so good to go out in the morning for my walk and then do the morning chores. Even the chickens and the pigs seemed to be reveling in the fineness of the morning. Around 9:30, while I was weeding in the long border, Kale called to me from next door and said she thought there was a swarm of bees. I went over and, sure enough, there was a swarm. It settled on a limb in the chestnut crab apple tree on the edge of the orchard. I called my friend Nancy Jones to see if she knew any local beekeepers that could come and capture it. She put me in touch with a lady in Genesee who came by, but just as we were setting up her hive, the bees swarmed again. This time they flew high and away over the beaver pond to some place far beyond. I was sorry we didn’t capture it. I miss keeping bees.

If you look closely, all those specks in the air are bees.

As soon as that adventure was over, I mowed. By then it was actually hot, 81°. I know anyone living south or west of here or at a lower elevation will think 81° is not really hot, but for Gold it is. Our average summer temperature is only 75°, so anything in the 80s is hot and if we hit the 90s, we start to melt. When I finished mowing, I came indoors to cool off a little.

Thursday was Miriam’s birthday. As usual, she made her own birthday cake. No one could make a better one, we all know that, so we don’t even try to make one for her. This time she made a layered hazelnut sponge cake with hazelnut praline crème moussleine. It was delicious. The Shilligs and their guests, the Kuprovs and the Sandovals, came over to celebrate with us.

Miriam's birthday celebration.

Miriam's birthday cake.

It was delicious.

Miriam left Friday morning to go to the Foster’s house for the weekend. I spent the morning doing my weekly errand run to Wellsville for chicken feed. When I got back from that, I made another run to the Amish feed store in Ulysses for pig food. That’s a new errand that I’ll be doing all summer and into the fall. And why don’t I buy my chicken feed at the Amish feed store too? It’s because my chickens are picky eaters. The Amish only sell mash or pelleted chicken feed. My chickens only like crumbles. And not just any crumbles. A few weeks ago Runnings didn’t have the feed I usually get them – (Nutrena Nature Wise 16% Protein Layer Crumbles with Organic Marigold Meal, Organic Dried Kelp, Yucca Extract, Oregano Essential Oil, Thyme Essential Oil, Rosemary Essential Oil, Star Anise Essential Oil) – and I bought the cheaper brand that is just plain old crumbles. When I fill their two feeders, it usually takes a day for them to empty both of them. It took three days with the cheap feed. They didn’t like it. When I got more of the feed they like, I still had some cheap feed left so I filled one feeder with their preferred feed and the other with the cheap stuff. That feeder is still full. They only eat from the other feeder. They are pretty bratty.

My chicken's preferred food, this is not a paid endorsement.

When I got back from my errands, I went out for the rest of the day and harvested comfrey. I have a lot of comfrey in my yard. I have to try hard to keep it under control. It grows in the orchard and that’s fine, but it also likes my flowerbeds and that’s not fine. It has very deep roots, so once it gets established, it is almost impossible to get rid of it. I compromise and tolerate its intrusion by using it. Every couple of weeks I cut to the ground any comfrey that is growing where I don’t want it. Then I take what I’ve cut and chop it up, stuff it in five gallon buckets, add water, and let it sit. It rots down into a very stinky, very nutritious fertilizer tea that I use on my flowers and vegetables. Anything left over gets composted. Comfrey makes great compost. Almost immediately, the plants I’ve cut down begin to regrow and the process starts again. I like turning what would otherwise be an obnoxious (if lovely looking) plant into something beneficial to the garden.

This huge toad lives in the cellar stairwell.

Yesterday morning when I went to feed the pigs, I found that some animal had discovered where I store the sacks of pig food in the high tunnel. It knocked over the open sack and spilled it across the floor and tore open other sacks. I found tracks on the tunnel floor that told me it was a raccoon. So either the one we trapped and released last week has made its way back – Kurt took it four miles away and I guess that’s possible – or there is another raccoon, which is probably the case. Either way, I solved the problem by buying a large trash can and putting the feed in there. I also set the live trap again, but haven’t caught anything so far.

Raccoon attack.

The solution.

I spent several hours yesterday weeding the old asparagus patch. Because it requires me to crawl on my hands and knees down the rows under the tall asparagus, I always wait until things are very dry. And they are very dry right now. We haven’t had rain since Monday and that wasn’t very much, less than a tenth of an inch. There is no rain in the forecast for the next week. It seems we’ve gone from too many rainy days in a row to way too many dry days in a row. I’ve resorted to watering some things by hand. The rain barrel down at the barn is less than half full and after tomorrow, I will have to start carrying water down from the house. Cars going up our dry dirt road stir up clouds of dust that cover everything with a layer of gray. It seems we’ve left the lush days behind us and gone straight on into summer.

The weeded asparagus patch.

Here we are in the middle of June already. The irises and lupine are almost done, that makes me sad. They never last long enough to suit me. The common poppies and the peonies are at their best right now. We picked our first batch of broccoli. The garlic has its scapes and I will harvest those tomorrow. In two or three weeks, the garlic bulbs will be ready to pull. The apples are about the size of a shooter marble now. We are picking strawberries every other day. There is something quintessentially June about standing at the kitchen sink, capping strawberries, glancing out the window at the goldfinches at the bird feeders on an early evening.

The very last of the irises.

My favorite lupine.

Our Sarah Bernhardt peony in full bloom now.

A very fragrant peony.

The first picking of broccoli.

Apples in progress.

It was a chilly 38° when I went out to do the chores this morning. There was fog over the beaver pond. But the sky was clear and as soon as the sun came up, it warmed right up. Today is Father’s Day. To celebrate, Stacey made cinnamon rolls and brought them to church to share. Our meetings were good. Hannah was one of the speakers in sacrament meeting and she gave a great talk. Now we’re home. We had lasagna and broccoli salad for lunch. It’s already time to do the afternoon chores. After that, I heard something about Father’s Day gifts and angel food cake with strawberries. The week ahead looks like it will be very warm – in the high 80s all week and no rain. The first day of summer is on Thursday and it feels like it already. Tomorrow canning season begins as I make a batch of strawberry jam. Sumer is icumen in. The year is rushing on.