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Field note 260920 · September 20, 2026 Our pond gets much of its water from the North Fork of Belden Creek, and it gets there with no pump, no power, and no help from me. A siphon does the work. It starts upstream, at a spot we call the dog wash, where an old small weir backs the creek into a pool. From there a pipe about four inches across runs down to the west end of the pond. The far end sits lower than the pool, and once that pipe is full of water, gravity takes over. It’

Field note 260831 · August 31, 2026 At the end of August, I walked a pond specialist from OSU Extension around our pond with a list of worries. By the time he left, most of them had shrunk, and a couple of new ones had moved in. Good signs first The pond is full of newts and dragonflies, and he took both as good news: signs of a reasonably healthy pond. He didn't see strong signs of stress. He also straightened me out on something I'd had wrong. Blue-green algae being present

Field note 260919 · September 19, 2026 Some ideas sound too good to be true. Cut a stick off a native shrub, push it into damp ground, and wait for it to become a shrub. That's live staking. In September I took a class on it at Shonnard's Nursery, sponsored by the Benton Soil and Water Conservation District, and learned that it really is nearly that simple, with a few rules that matter. No pots, no greenhouse, no fuss. Just the right stick, cut the right way, at the right tim

Field note 260819 · August 19, 2026 Some threats arrive with a bang. Emerald ash borer arrives quietly, a small beetle you'll probably never see. It has killed ash trees across much of the country, and it's in Oregon now. As of this August, it hadn't turned up in Benton County. We have Oregon ash along the creek, so I asked an OSU Extension forester what a landowner should do while there's still time. The answer was simpler than I expected: get to know your ash now. Why now W

Field note 260825 · August 25, 2026 Coast redwood keeps coming up as a candidate tree for a warmer western Oregon, and every time it does, I think about the ones I planted on our south side. They didn't make it. So when an OSU Tree School session in August took on growing redwoods and giant sequoia in Oregon, I went in with a personal stake in the answer. What happened here The south-side planting went in under the forest canopy. Within about five years, every one of those tr

An old trail with no paperwork In the southwest corner of Larkspur Run, an old skid trail runs from the landing at the top of the south hill down toward the creek. It isn't entirely on my land. Part of it swings onto the neighboring timber parcel and then comes back. Nobody I know can tell me when it was cut. My best guess is the 1970s, when the parcels around us were logged. It could be older, a leftover from the first harvest that took the original old-growth out of these h