WITH SOME GRAINS OF SALT AND SOME HEAT

Summer so far

Reddish sunsets, fog, smog, smell of smoke in the air all the way from Canada, southern style humidity along with heat––that's summer so far.  I can only imagine what it must be like in the hotter places on the planet, places hitting temperatures like 115,120, or continual days of 100-plus along with humidity.  Monday, July 3 this year was the hottest day ever on our planet, the day the average global temperature––the southern hemisphere winter and both poles––reached 62.62 degrees F. 

What kind of world are we heading toward?

A hot and orangey evening

That is too depressing a thought.  I don't want to go there.  

I am going to look the other way and describe something completely different.  

An earlier blog post described the end of my natural pool.  This is about its replacement.

Changing the landscape

Final day of the natural pool.  

 June 14th, 8 AM

And then it was gone.

June 15th, 1:30 PM

The replacement is trundled through the meadow, placed, braced, and filled.

Days pass, and before long it's complete.

June 26th, 6 PM

Looking somewhat less raw on July 8th, 2 PM


 

About that salt...

Some differences, some similarities with what used to be.  This pool is as wide but four feet longer, yet holding less water: 8,000 gallons versus 11,000 because its depth is uniform, not ranging from 4 to 8 feet.  Plantings include a feather reed grass, as before, fronted by switchgrass, with a few sedums to round a corner and junipers to help hide the filtration system.  

But here is the biggest difference:  salt.  I had thought that when someone talked about a salt pool they meant a pool with ocean water.  And that would have to be artificially created, of course, not being exactly by the ocean.  But that's not what it means, as it turns out. Yes, even though I'd ordered it, I didn't understand it until it arrived.  

A salt pool is cleaned using a filtration system called a salt chlorine generator that turns the salt into chlorine via electrolysis.  The result is less chlorine overall, with softer water, hence no chlorine odor or eye-stinging or whatever else.  As for the saltiness quotient, because the amount of salt in the pool is only around 3,000 ppm, whereas the ocean may be around 33,000 ppm, it doesn't really feel or taste salty. It's not without maintenance, however, but thankfully the filtration system keeps track of pH and other parameters so I'm free of the regular nightmares about sneakily rising pH and unexpected spurts of algae growth. And there's a cute little robot I can toss into the pool when it needs a bit of scrubbing that works like a roomba except that it can also climb walls. Really!

I loved the fact that in the old pool we swam with frog and newts.  "Regular" pools are frankly pretty sterile.  Although one or two tree frogs have been occasional visitors (sitting on the critter rescue pad or tucked into one of the niches at the corners) as have two garter snakes (or one snake visiting twice.)  I'll settle for the sterility.

No algae here.  A critter rescue pad sits on the pool edge.

I can only imagine how my natural pool would behave given the probable future of steadily increasing days of heat.    

Think I'll go for a swim.