Homestead Rescue Update #1 – The Pond!

Thank you to all who watched our episode of Homestead Rescue on Discovery Channel and have expressed interest in our story! We really appreciated the Raney’s coming out to help us and all the kind thoughts that followed.

I’ve received a number of inquiries asking about how the projects done by the Raney’s have turned out for us and thought it was past due time to provide some more thorough explanations all in one place. We’ll start with the pond and follow up with the other projects. Feel free to comment with questions or requests for other areas you want to know about!

The pond is the area I get asked about most as it was a huge project and really the primary water solution the Raney’s helped with. It was enormous and really had the potential to provide us with more water than we could even use!

But did the pond fill???

It did! And it was miraculous for a moment! We had a record breaking dry fall after the pond was dug, so it kept us in suspense for a whole season waiting to see how much it would collect and if it would hold beyond the water that was hauled in for it during the show which was probably only a foot deep. We finally ended up getting a huge rain event in early winter which filled the pond seemingly overnight and I quickly got immersed in research to figure out how next we would pump and filter the water for use. Note that wasn’t talked about on the show: We also had to get a water right to even dig the pond in Oregon and apply for a subsequent water right to actually use the water. So we began moving onto phase 2 of putting our new pond into action!

We have a young child (also not mentioned in the show) so it was high priority for me to get a fence around what was now a pretty dangerous body of water for a 3 year old to have access to. In parallel, we really wanted to get the goats out on the pasture surrounding the pond to allow them to graze (more on the goats in a future post!) So Anthony got to quick work and seriously busted his butt building a high quality fence around the pond and about two acres, almost entirely by himself, in the evenings after work and weekends, even in the dark. I don’t give my husband enough credit sometimes. He really is a work horse!

Then the unthinkable…another failure.

As the rains poured down in January 2020, our excitement faded and we had an extreme shift of directions as the ground surrounding the pond began unstable. Day after day, we watched large cracks, big enough for a person to fall into, form around the uphill side of the pond followed by large chunks of earth dropping off into the water! The priority of the fence quickly increased, but not as a means to get the goats in secure pasture, but to keep anything and everything out as it became an increasingly dangerous situation! The ground saturated by rain, pushed the sticky clay soil to the surface in the cracks and it was like quicksand. I once had to rescue one our dogs that ventured too close and quickly sunk all four legs, deep up to his belly and couldn’t get out! I was almost up to my knees when I freed him and made it a rule that nobody was to go near the pond if we were home alone. If our dog got stuck that quickly, there was no way the goats could be allowed out there either.

It was devastating to watch what we thought was finally going to be the ultimate solution to our problem literally fall apart before our eyes. The cracks turned into a slow moving landslide which spread way beyond the size of the actual pond and pulled a huge chunk of our pasture into the water. As the landslide grew and more earth fell into the pond, it displaced the now about 500,000 gallons of water it had collected and pushed the limits of the ponds holding capacity. The water pressure quickly started to erode large cracks in the down hill side of the pond near our neighbors property and water completely avoided the overflow channel Marty had put in. Just another reminder for us how incredibly unpredictable water can be.

At this point I was starting to panic that one of two things would happen. 1) The pond would have a complete breach and flood the neighboring property below us or 2) the landslide would continue to move uphill and start to erode into the neighboring property above us. At this poing I contacted the producers of the show to see if there was anything they could do to help.

They did send a small construction crew out to help mitigate the situation. While it was just a band-aid on a gaping wound, they did help dig out the overflow channel to redirect and slow the breach. They also dug a trench on the uphill side along with laying a ridulous amount of plastic down to help direct water away from the landslide/pond. Gotta love stressing out and taking emergency measure to direct water away from the pond you were hoping to collect it in!

As the landslide slowed and the earth around the pond resettled, it slowly drained out through the cracks that had opened in the lower side and hasn’t held water since early last spring. We now have no use of our pasture due to the damage, even if we had water to get livestock. We had local guy with an excavation business come out and asses the damage and help come up with a plan to try to fill in the pond and repair the pasture. At this point, it’s too much of a risk to try to repair the pond end up with worsening erosion. Even with a local friend deal, it’s going to cost of thousands of dollars to repair so we have a stable, unusable pasture again. We were hoping to do it this summer 2020, but unfortunately the excavator never got the availability for us.

I so appreciate the Raney’s help and Marty and Clint in particular who put a tremendous amount of effort into building the pond for us, even on their days off during production. This was something we had wanted to try for a long time and the implementation was a collaboration with the Raney’s. It’s so unfortunate that it turned out this way, but we wouldn’t have known how things had turned out and probably never would have taken the initiative on our own to try it without the Raney’s help. So goes the way things are here on our homestead. Another experiment tried, one step forward, two steps back and another problem to solve. Back to the drawing board on water solutions while we hope that the remaining “pond” doesn’t collect any water and re-start the landslide again this winter.