Last walk around the pond and end of trip summary @TimelineRanch

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Well, welcome back to Timeline Ranch.

[00:00:01]It's a beautiful morning. This is an end of trip summary. Let's take a walk around the pond and I'll show you what all we got accomplished this trip.

[00:00:10]It's always nice to see the wind pushing on little bit of water, making a little bit of oxygen here and there.

[00:00:20]Water cleared out nicely since I haven't been stirring any dust up that was floating this direction. Anyway, and these deals sure attract a lot of winged insects, a lot of gnats, flies, hoverflies.

[00:00:42]Seen a few bees over here.

[00:00:46]They're they're a little hub for action right now where there's not a lot of flowers available here in early January.

[00:00:55]You can see that one in there is exactly the same.

[00:01:07]That's nice to see.

[00:01:10]I don't think they'll have any shortage of pollinators.

[00:01:16]We got another deal popping up over here.

[00:01:23]Yeah, that deal is officially naturalized here at the ranch.

[00:01:28]I haven't planted it in I guess it's been about four years now.

[00:01:33]It keeps popping up every year. Looking forward to spring around here. Sure, it's going to be nice, especially if we get a few light rains early on in spring to get everything kickarted. You can see the ochre pods from this last year. And these were seeds from two years ago.

[00:01:50]They finally had enough water to germinate. Seed pods are still holding all the seeds for this coming year.

[00:01:56]And I'm looking forward to seeing these new little pecan trees I planted pop up.

[00:02:04]Let's see if there's some of those toe biters down there in the water this morning.

[00:02:16]Well, I know they're in there. See if there's something visible.

[00:02:24]Temperatures felt like early spring.

[00:02:27]Beautiful day.

[00:02:30]Got a few ochre pods that grew inside this fenced area next to this older pecan tree.

[00:02:38]I was really hoping to get some more vertical growth out of them, but didn't really happen this past year. It started out fairly dry in the spring, so they didn't get started very early. Then it finally rained good enough to get everything going and they ran out of grow season.

[00:02:57]Then we get another five, six years under their belt, these roots from these pecan trees will be down deep enough that they'll be able to tap into that water even when it's very dry. They'll just keep right on trucking along.

[00:03:24]A little thistle there.

[00:03:28]blooming.

[00:03:32]There's a bit of a microclimate with this rock bank here. Gets heated up in the evening in the west, you know, the west sun on it and then in the morning stays a little warmer. So, keeps everything going a little bit longer.

[00:03:48]Yeah, there's one of those toe biters right there.

[00:04:04]and they're pretty big. About 2 in about 60 mm.

[00:04:09]They eat pretty much anything that comes in front of them that they can latch on to. Their bite's supposed to be painful enough to put fish into shock.

[00:04:19]They can eat them.

[00:04:22]I've never been bit by one and I hope I never am.

[00:04:31]I think on the next trip out I'm bring some minnows, see how they do.

[00:04:38]Maybe they'll clean up some of the algae in here. I haven't seen any of the snails back again since the 13 months with no no rain.

[00:04:49]Dried up the pond completely. I don't I figured some eggs were still around, but doesn't seem like anything's showed up yet. A lot of water bugs, tadpoles, you know, that type of thing.

[00:05:12]It's a beautiful day.

[00:05:19]So this trip I was able to haul all these spoils out from about nine months ago when I dug this section of the pond over here down considerably deeper. It's about 14 ft deep right now.

[00:05:32]I ran out of time to get all the spools out of here. So I just drug them up out of what would have been the water line for the most part as far as I can get it. There's still a little bit down on the water line, but I can't quite get couldn't, you know, without pulling a bunch of mud out. I didn't want to pull it out this trip. So, I got that all hauled up there on the road. Of course, my dump treasure hydraulic pump went out on me. And I had a spare hydraulic pump here just for that situation, but it was defective. Unfortunately, it's been here for jeez, 5 years, 6 years. Long time.

[00:06:07]Just sitting in a box ready to be used.

[00:06:11]That's a beautiful site. It's going to look real nice when I get this beach area over here of that riverbed gravel and sand that water lapping against it like that.

[00:06:23]Be a true little oasis. It already is an oasis, but it'll look even more like one at that point.

[00:06:31]There's our other little deep pocket.

[00:06:34]This is about 12 ft deep right here. And I finally was able to get all the spoils hauled off from when I dug that a couple years back. That's all the rock that was mixed in with those spoils. I separated it as I pulled it out of there.

[00:06:54]Our almond tree is looking good.

[00:06:59]Yeah, it's looking good in there.

[00:07:04]Surprised it still has leaves this late.

[00:07:05]We just haven't caught a good hard freeze. We caught a little light freeze that killed the moringa.

[00:07:20]Nice little asterac family flowers here. These are all over the place. When we get a good monsunal season and we get a lot of light rains, you can see they're popping up through here, but this will look like carpet with them eventually.

[00:07:41]Be nice to see again.

[00:07:57]See some of that buoyant organic material. It's going to turn into some good soil later.

[00:08:03]Of course, the kids dragging a bunch of stuff out.

[00:08:13]I don't want this to end up in the pond.

[00:08:16]Get another rain.

[00:08:18]That was a good bit of rock I pulled out of there.

[00:08:23]about four 12 yard dump trucks worth.

[00:08:30]I'll sort through it later, figure out what's good for just embankment erosion control and what's good for building stone structures.

[00:08:52]It'll be interesting to see if all this sorghum goes to seed.

[00:08:57]You can see some of it's doing pretty good. Some of it's a little behind over here.

[00:09:06]The rodents ate all the seeds off of this one cuz it was closer to the ground.

[00:09:14]So, I was able to use some of the rock that I pulled from those spoils right here where the monsunal heavy rain event washed some of the rock into the pond. I'm going to rework this later when I have time with some concrete and rebar and, you know, embed rock into it.

[00:09:29]So, it just looks like stone, but where it can't go anywhere.

[00:09:37]Just don't have time to mess with it right now. Also put a little rock right over here where it went around the big leaky wear on this southern creek that feeds the pond. Main main main creek that feeds it.

[00:09:51]Let's go right over here to the road.

[00:09:55]So I put some work into this lower part of the road right here. Built this out a good bit on that turn.

[00:10:02]I planned on working mainly on this upper section of road, which is going to allow me to build that stone dome structure for the water tanks later.

[00:10:13]But my dump trailer broke, so it was going to be pretty hard on the machine to drive up there every time to pull the spoils out of the trailer.

[00:10:22]Ended up building this road out here more.

[00:10:32]So, I put a little time into this side of the road. Water's going to come down here eventually as a channel it this way. It'll dump in this little ponding area, overflow out of that into this swell on contour uh slashbart ditch.

[00:10:49]It'll follow the side of the road all the way to the north creek, dump into that, and end up back in the pond.

[00:10:57]I'm going to pull this rock down once I shoot the grade over here. Make sure it's right.

[00:11:03]Let's go right up here on the road. See what little bit I got done before the dump trailer broke on me.

[00:11:13]I was able to put just a little bit of time up here.

[00:11:16]Built that out a little bit more and filled in this portion right through here. But when the dump trailer broke, it wasn't wasn't the top priority.

[00:11:28]Mainly wanted to get the spoils over from the pond out of the way.

[00:11:39]Yeah, it's a shame to have to leave on such a pretty day. Uh like usual, it is what it is. I've got about a 13- 14 hour drive back. Hopefully, I don't have any issues with the trailer. no tires blow or any other issues. Well, if you like what I'm doing out here and you want to help speed this project up, there's a few ways to do that in the description.

[00:11:57]Buy me coffee is one. There's also Amazon. Every little bit will get me closer to being out here full-time. Make this project go a lot faster. Thanks for watching. and I'll see you on the next one.