One thing I definitely didn't imagine myself doing, when we decided to buy a home? Mucking out a pond overflow grate! It gets clogged by these floating weeds, which I have remove either with a small rake, or (when it's quite stuck in there) by hand wearing rubber gloves.
On the plus side, the times it's been really blocked, the rushing sound of the water as it pours into the concrete pipe is really nice.
I'm still not entirely clear on where the pipe goes. It aims toward the street, and my neighbor on the other side of the street, Joe, has a little creek on the down-slope of his property, so in my mind it seemed clear that our pond was feeding that? Joe, however, said that they're not directly connected, and when I asked where my pipe went, he waved toward the road and said "the catch basin," which I later realized is not a word that I understand. It's possible he meant the storm drain, but I really have no idea!
Joe's the reason I realized the drain had to be cleared at all; he mentioned it to me in passing in the autumn, and I vaguely scooped some leaves out at one point without thinking I'd need to do much else. Then when we got those repeated heavy rainstorms in November, the pond started to overflow the rocks at the edge because the weeds had jammed up the grate so badly. The first time I cleared it by hand was during a break in one of those downpours, and it roared when I got it open.
Joe confirmed for us that the pond is, indeed, man-made by our house's original owner, who Joe said just "got bored, started digging." Because there's so much underground water here, the pond stays pretty full on its own. I do wonder if I went to town hall if I could find any information on it -- who laid the concrete overflow pipe, for example, and where does it go??
The funny thing is that even a man-made pond still falls under the Inland Wetlands Commission and is protected by the town. We wouldn't be allowed to just strafe it with chemicals if we wanted to kill the pond weeds, for example. And Branford takes that shit seriously. We learned (also from Joe! Old man neighbors know all the shit) that the people in the house behind us, who we refer to as Todd and Margo, disliked Tony and Angela who we bought the house from -- in part, supposedly, because they had tried to buy the house themselves. Joe told me that Tony spent a lot of time removing poison ivy from the edge of the pond, but wound up removing some cattails in the process....and Todd and Margot reported him to the commission for it! He had to go appear before them to justify what he'd done. That's like, next-level drama. Their property line, interestingly enough, slices off just a small part of the far end of the pond from the road, so I suppose they do have an investment of sorts. We haven't met Todd and Margo in person. We're happy to judge them from afar.
Joe's other piece of interesting pond info was that there's apparently a fountain in the center of ours! He told me to keep an eye out for a black tube, somewhere on the side (buried in the cattails, probably). He said we'd need to run electrical (which later had me scratching my head, because does that imply that there already was a buried electrical line somewhere between house + pond? Seems like the kind of shit you'd want to know...) and get a pump. I kind of want to make this happen this summer. And you'd better believe I'm going out in the rowboat. That's what caused the dead patch at left in the photo, it's where the boat was overturned. Another unexpected homeowner task, in the fall, was cleaning a rowboat so we could haul it into the shed for the winter. Never really thought I'd have to worry about that.
Pond weed aside, there's barely a day that goes by that one of us doesn't look around and say "I fucking love this house." I can't believe we've only been here three months!
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