Pond after Rain

It has rained the entire week and as a result the pond is in rough shape.  The winds in the storms blew every single crab-apple blossum into the pond plus a fair number of sticks and other debris.  Visibility is only about a foot and a half.  When the pond is in good shape its crystal clear to the bottom  Part of the issue is also the DOCs.  See all those bubbles under the waterfall?  That is not good.  Those are DOC's or dissolved organic compounds.  Its the result of leaves blowing into the pond and starting to rot for  the entire winter.  Leaves I have only started to remove.  Normally I would be farther along but the water is still only 55 degrees and putting on waders and spending a few hours scooping up methane loaded rot is the recipe for a bad day which one has to mentally psych oneself up for.  The cool weather has not inspired me so instead I have been doing a scoop or two at a time, in between rain storms.

The big yellow koi is Luna.  I have had her since she was 4" long.  She spent November through March under ice with no problem whatsoever.  This is because my pond is 4 feet deep and doesn't freeze to the bottom but more importantly it only has 4 koi in it, Luna, Fred, Bella and Ginny.  The fewer koi the larger the margin of error.  I don't have any intention of making this group any larger. This size herd allows me to go on vacation and ignore them there is enough in the pond where they can sustain themselves.  Plus each time you introduce a new fish there is a significant risk of introducing bad disease

The goals this weekend is to get the leaf debris reduced by 75% at least, and get this final load of seedlings planted. 

I'm hesitating for two reasons.  1) we have two nights in coming days with lows of 36 degrees.  That is cutting it closer than I like.  The remaining unplanted seedlings and plants are primarily tenders and expensive ones at that.  I may hold off a few more days. 2) Reason two is another good reason to delay.  It has rained the entire week we got several inches and everything is pretty wet.  The winds are up again so it will dry out fast but I'm not sure fast enough for any work at Mar-duke.  Fingers crossed there!

This week's garden related tasks

This is the time of year that there is not much to do.  Its too wet to do much outside and I'm running out of room to plant any more inside.  I've summed up the week's activities below.

Monday:  move seedlings outside am
                move seedlings inside pm
Tuesday:  move seedlings outside am
                move seedlings inside pm
Wednesday:  move seedlings outside am
               Replant more seeds for things that did not sprout yet (peppers and eggplants)
              move plants inside pm
Thursday:  move plants outside
             bottom fertilize with Organic Neptunes Gold Fish and Seaweed (stinky!)
            Move stinky plants inside pm
            burn candle to try to cover stinky fish scent
           open windows
           give up and go to bed
Friday:  4pm  move plants outside-forgot to do it earlier
            4:30 pm move plants inside to save them from the hail.

Tomorrow if the weather is decent its time for spring pond clean-up. (blech)  Plan B is continue wiht the really good book I'm reading.   Fingers crossed for rain! 

Finished Pond Pictures

We got the last few boulders in two days ago and the plantings and fish are maturing nicely.  Here are some shots of the area at the peak of the heat wave.  Building this was so much work but not that it is done, work to maintain is nothing more than emptying the leaf bucket, topping off the water and once a week hosing down the skimmer pad.  The fish are tame, and come up to be fed.  Red Head Fred continues his trickery, now his head is mostly white with a few orange speckles.  The amount of enjoyment we are getting from the area is immense.  Even with the heat, we are hanging out here multiple times a day.  All an all, this project was well worth all the bandaids, and sweat and dollars.

Baby Koi Pictures!

The pond has it's first fish! Two of them came all the way from Japan. Meet Luna, who I think is an Ogon Butterfly Koi and Ginny who I think is a Gin Rin Kohaku Koi. Ginny has red lips and blue eyes and a whole lot of sparkle!  So far Ginny hides 99% of the time but Luna is brave and very easy to spot in the water.

 Also in the pond is Red Head Fred.  Fred has less of a pedigree than the girls but he is pretty cool looking all the same.  Unfortunately I have no picture of Fred.  I was so excited to get him in his new digs I forgot all about it!

Pond is coming along.  Hope to finish the veggie filter pond this week and then it is all landscaping!

Waterfall Progress

I spent 12 hours on Friday another 16 on Saturday and Sunday putting about 12 stones on the waterfall.  I'm excited though because I tried out out on Sunday and it works, with only a few tiny leaks!  So why does a short little waterfall take so long to build.  Ah, for many reasons you would never anticipate.

1.  Deluge of rain each day means work interruption, timing of silicone and foam and concrete to work with pending storms.
2.  Deluge of rain each day makes working with massive boulders on tiny wheels on slippery clay...challenging.
3.  Taffy and Daffy the duck visit twice a day.  I feel bad if I scare them so I work slower so as not to startle them.
4.  I spend a lot of time studying stuff.
5.  The rocks are too big.  It took me two hours to get this one off the driveway and into the vicinity of the waterfall.  Then another sweaty hour to get it in place.  The picture doesn't do a good job showing how heavy this is.  I cannot lift even one end of it solo.  Thus the 2x4 in the background.  I learned I can lift a whole lot of rock with a piece of strong wood! 

6.  Limited rock selection.   I only want to move each of these once, which means a lot of time plotting out how it will all fit together.  Since I only have two pallets, I have to plan a few moves ahead.  As we know, I am a bit slow in the whole planning arena.

The goal was to get water flowing down this, this weekend.  We have two new urgencies to inspire faster working.  A BBQ in early June and a new addition to the pond.  We have koi.  Our first of the favorite Harry Potter characters has been added to the water.  Red Head Fred got added to the pond about an hour before a massive thunderstorm.  He promptly disappeared for days.  Since he is a little guy (3") I was a bit worried he became a duck mcnugget but we spotted him on Saturday!  Since Red Head Fred ain't dead, I need to get this filter going!

So here is where I am not.  The area is a HUGE mess, the falls are still sort of sticking out in the middle of nowhere.  The final plan has plantings around them.  I already got a few things in, the amazing Stich in Time hosta has a place of honor at the front lower left.  A division of my Paul's Glory is at the top and a tassle fern is near the bottom with some scotch moss you can't see yet.  Once the rain slows down I will be out daily.  Must get pond done!

Learning Lotus and Lilies

I've been gardening for a long time.  Because of this is it really weird to be working with a group of plants that I feel absolutely clueless about.  I'm experiencing this now with the water plants for the pond.  A couple of weeks ago I ordered a few plants to try things out.  I ordered 1 hardy water lily , one tropical water lily (Director T. Moore shown above) and 1 lotus (Thousand petals).  They came the other day along with an additional tropical lily called "Imperial".

I immediately panicked when I opened the package.  Basically they were water lilies set in giant baggies with a tiny bit of moisture in there.  The directions said plant immediately.  Okee Dokee no problem, how do I plant them?  The site I bought them from (Texas Water Lilies) had some really great directions.  I didn't skim them either which is why I was able to quickly observe that the tropical lilies want pond temperatures of at least 65 and preferably 70 degrees.  On the day the lilies came, it was 37 degrees outside.  I checked the pond and it was 61 degrees.  Surprising.  I decided that the 61 degrees wasn't going to last too long with the air temps being down so I had to figure out another plan.  The internet saved me here in that I was told to stick them in a big pot inside.  So that is where the tropical ones are now.

I'm a little concerned about T. More.  One of the leaves turned black.  It seems to be very sensitive to touch, bruises easily.  The bloom opens every morning and closes each night but I don't think this plant is happy.  I hope the weather gives me a bunch of heat soon so I can get this outside.

I'm toying with what to do about the lotus on the left.  It is just coming out of dormancy.  I have no idea if the stems it is showing need to be in the water or are OK above it.  I'm thinking of putting this in the pond this weekend.  The thing that gives me pause with all of this is that these were not inexpensive plants.  If they croak I am out a decent amount of cash.  I probably should have started with something cheaper, but I wanted to go to most pretty right away.  :P

The hardy water lily is in the pond.  I was worried that adding a pot full of clay would make the water cloudy.  It didn't at all.  I'm glad to get these started.  Plants in the pond, eat the nutrients in the pond.  Keeping nutrient levels down is a great way to keep algae suppressed.  Between that and the UV I turned on this past weekend.  I am hoping to avoid green floaters completely.  Except for those I want of course.  Hang in there T. Moore!

Rock On A Roll

I did a lot of research related to finishing my pond's edge.  There are many options, grass, time, small stone, a ring of boulders, poured edge, ring of flagstone etc etc.
My plan is still evolving in my head as I stare at this space a bit each day.  What I've know for sometime is that I do not want the common pearl necklace of flagstone around the edge (too formal).  I also wanted some flatter areas for easy access.  I also wanted low maintenance and didn't want to worry about thousands of tiny pebbles falling into the pond.  That is why I was so excited to find Rock on a Roll.   It is what it sounds like.  Rock.  On a roll.  It is completely flexible.  It shapes itself to conform to whatever it is laying over the top of.  It is water friendly, easy to work with and very realistically colored.

I am using it around the entire perimeter of my pond to cover and protect the liner.   It also does a fabulous job covering the wrinkles.  Wrinkles under rock on a roll just make the rock work look even more realistic.  Done right it ends up looking like a way more expensive poured shell.  Installation took a bit of time because I wanted a lip to the pond edge to help contain the mulch;/grass/moss that are coming.  I did this by gluing flexible plastic electrical gluing to the collar, then draping the liner over it, then the rock on a roll over that.  Landscaping fabric and mulch finished off the area in front of the seatwall.  All it needs now is some plants.  I started with a bit of phlox (I like its mossy look).  Added a bit of hardy lavender to the one end.  Coming soon are a few Canna, some wintergreen and a few other herbs to keep the edible theme going!  Yay Progress! 

Thirty Pounds of Petals

Several things have become apparent this spring. First the crazy hot weather has killed my plans for stuff staying dormant until I could get the waterfall and veggie filter built. Second, everything I do takes four times longer to build than I thought.

So this morning I noticed that the magnolia was about to blow. Last year it dropped its petals all at once and I weighed them. They were thirty pounds DRY. I really didn't want to deal with that in the water so today I took time between conference calls to quickly rigged up a temporary line to get the water running thru the skimmer. It all works! No leaks and holy cow it cleaned things up FAST! I'm amazed at how quiet the pump is too. All in all a good day!

I'm Never Going to Finish this Pond!

Sunday was another gorgeous day.  Eighty four degrees which is around 35 degrees above normal!  The goal was to complete the piping to the veggie filter, from the waterfall box and for the overflow line.  Before I could do the one from the overflow line, I had to cut a notch out of the concrete collar.  The notch is about 2.5 inches deep and about 14 inches long.  In other words ITS SMALL!

It took me five bleeping hours!  Yes five.  I attacked it with a sawzall, chisels and a circulating saw. Five hours later the little channel for the overflow pipe is done. Was I kicking myself for forgetting to put this in when the concrete was wet? You bet I was, lol. This was messy painful business. My husband was watching me and told me that my ratio of whacks to the chisel to whacks to my hand was roughly 4:1. Now you know why it took me five hours.

The only other thing complete was the planting of six pansies, the watering of the tomato babies and the ordering of some organic mosquito control tablets.  Oh well, the forecast for the rest of the week is good too.

The Hole-A Pond Story part Seven

Stacy Pulls A Pond and other acts of insanity. 

This occurred Nov 10, 2011, sharing it now.

Today's weather: Cold 30 degrees, windy, rainy, yucky, blechy, blah
Today's mission: Remove 2398472 wet leaves from pond and net it at last
Today's plan: Buy cabana boy pool skimmer thing. Put on rubber garden boots. Remove leaves. Net pond.

Work took me to New York this week. Got back last night. Unfortunately the pond netting didn't get delivered before I left and while I was gone we had another major wind storm and a whole lot of rain. Good news is pond is holding water! Bad news is that pond is holding leaves.   Lots and lots of them. It is also thirty degrees out there right now, which means leaf removal is going to be chilly business!

The pond cover netting came while I was gone. Today's plan was to get the leaves out, get the netting up and fix the liner that started to fall in. Tick tock tick tock, not much time left. Had flakes flying last night! I need to make this quick because I am a popsicle and need to defrost with a shower. I spent $25 on the cabana boy pool skimmer thing and it was money wasted.  It was was taking forever to get the leaves out and I was freezing.  It was so flat, the leaves kept drifting off the top, my cute rubber boots were not tall enough, got a bit of water in them... you get the picture. Also, it was really really cold out.

I needed a new plan. My second plan was to try and mimic what I saw on a koi forum when they all capture the koi by dragging a giant net thru the water. I would use my shiny new 15x20 foot net and drag it thru the water and capture all the leaves at once. FAIL.  Unfortunately I forgot that they do it with a dozen or so people holding the netting, in water that is a few degrees warmer than freezing. This didn't work solo. Though no doubt the neighbors probably enjoyed the production.

Oh Yay snow.  Fan-frickentastic.

Right around this time it started snowing. Charming little flakes which would have been exciting if I wasn't so cold. At this point I exited the pond grabbed my cabana boy pool thing and tried to get the net to stop being so floaty. Didn't work. (Duh)

Then I had a mini-tantrum where I started whacking at it in frustration. This caused a brick that was on the edge of the pond to fall into the water, onto the net, weighting down the edge. Hey now, this could work! I started sort of stirring the water, guiding the leaves to the net and because one edge was down and the annoying floaty edge stayed up, I was able to create a current by pulling the water one way. This worked brilliantly, the leaves came up off the bottom, but got stuck in the net. I had most of them netted in about twenty minutes. I was pretty cool how great it actually worked. It had also stopped snowing. Things were looking up. I just had to get this massive net now filled with bazillions of wet heavy leaves out of the pond.

Got pretty well soaked doing that. Now actively shivering but almost done!

I started getting the net across the pond for final placement. This was harder than it should have been primarily because I should have bought a bigger net. If I pulled too hard on one side, the net edge fell in the water, and I had to get in the water AGAIN to fish it out. Eventually I figured out it was impossible for one person to get this done before hypothermia set in.  (I was actively shivering at this point.   Luckily the school bus arrived and I could recruit a munchkin to assist. Munchkins wanting stuff are easy to recruit. My munchkin was hoping for some new tunes We got it placed in about five minutes and weighted down with bricks . I immediately realized the bricks would never hold. Too many leaves. I went searching for stakes and string. Settled for 16 gauge electrical wire and chunks of wood. Wrapping wire is easier than tying knots when fingers are icy and painfully numb.

Yes, those are some leaves still under the net.  *Grumble*

Unfortunately by this time it has started sleeting. Giant chunks of icy fun. Pretty darn sucky. <--{PC version of what I really mean}. I got about six stakes in and decided to call it quits for today. The final straw was after moving a bit of tarp I was almost killed by nuclear spider. He is clearly freakish and dangerous because spiders aren't supposed to be alive when it is snowing and he was very much alive, waving his hairy legs around like that. He could be a brown recluse, which you definitely don't want a bite from. Particularly if he is nuclear.

Nuclear Spider

If you don't hear from me for awhile it is either because I have pneumonia, my husband has had me committed for insanity, or nuclear spider got me.

February 28th, 2012
The above is where I left it last fall.  At one point I had to remove the netting because we had a big snowstorm and I didn't want the snow to rip it.  Now the ice is covered with lots of leaves that I need to clear off before the thaw.  Hopefully today.  This is what the unfinished pond has looked like all winter.

The Hole: A Pond is Born-Part Six

Part Six of last fall's tale- Part one starts here.

November 6, Morning.  It's a Beautiful Morning...I think I'll go outside for a time...

Today I've decided I'm actually quite brilliant deciding to dig a pond so late in the season. What an extraordinary morning, the light, the leaves, the chilly breeze. Just fantastic.

Yesterday I filled in the long trench for a chunk of the day. I put pea gravel that we had laying around under the pipe so now the whole set up doubles as a french drain. I also starting mucking with the waterfall/veggie pond area. I switched it around completely from my original plan. I've been reminded that veggies like sun, so now the veggie filter is in a sunnier area.

Today I was up early. I blew all the leaves out of the hole, trimmed out remaining roots and trimmed up my foam patching which was quite fun. Now its time for underlayment!! I'm hoping liner today as well. Still haven't figured out how we will get that done. I have a vague plan which includes my big husband, some hefty plant rollers and a kid with the 911 number handy. Wish me luck!

Before work begins, I need to do something about these leaves!

 November 5-Evening

It's a Waterless Pond!!

We missed the ER, but just barely!

It started lovely. I had on tunes, I was in socks spreading out a fuzzy blanket over the hole. Breeze picked up and windchill got down to about 40 but it was warm in the pit! I learned that kiddos in socks are excellent at doing the Princess and the Pea thing. They found a handful of sharpies that I missed that I had to cut out. The geotextile liner was really nice to work with. It cut easily and the fibers in it made it sort of stick to itself and the edge of the collar. Despite the wind, I only needed a few bricks to keep it up.

First dramatic moment came from Bendy Boy(my son). He was screwing around and popped his knee out of its joint. Unfortunately he was at the bottom of the pond when he did it. Neither my husband and I were all that excited about hauling him out and to the ER so we tried to see if we could get it back in. Success! I'm sure it hurt like you know what we got past that crisis in about 15 minutes with minimal tears. Liner time!

The liner is 24x35. It is heavy. The plan with it was to load it onto my plant rollers. They hold 500# each so I figured 370 pounds of liner should be a peace of cake. I worked great! We were easily able to load it. I wheeled it myself to the pond edge then we edged it to the bottom without too much trouble. Once it was on the bottom, we unrolled it from there and then unfolded the sides. The bottom came out with almost no wrinkles from the get go, as a result. The sides? Wrinkles, but that is to be expected from the pond shape. I'm not all that worried about them since rock on a roll is going to cover them. I'll fuss with them a little more tomorrow.

Bottom drain was next. This too was minimal drama, other than putting WAY more marine grade silicone than necessary, it went smoothly. Very scarey making that cut though! I was expecting the slicing to be much harder. As a result I used more force than necessary and I almost cut to far. Didn't though!

Last thing I did today was the skimmer face. Thank goodness I watched the video on this one first. I almost forgot to put the weir door in!. I had about five minutes of panic when I punctured the first hole and then couldn't get the first bolt in. Once that one was in though, they all went smooth. I left some slack liner under it, in case things settle or I want to raise the skimmer at a later date. So it looks a little poofy in the picture.

I was just getting the last bolt in when I heard CRASH! *&&*%^ *&%&^% *&^*&^. My husband cracked his head open working under the deck. It was a bloody affair for a few minutes but stiches were averted. He is watching hockey with a giant ice pack on his head. Me, I'm ready to warm up with a bubble bath. My ears are icy but I am so glad to be at this point. Next stage is filling, but that is not happening on purpose until the netting I ordered comes.   I really reallyt really really really need it to come soon.  There are already a lot of leaves in there just from the past couple of hours the weather is turning fast and I don't want to be fishing billions of leaves out of water once the first rain comes.

"Someone really needs to get at those leaves"

The Hole: A Pond Saga, er I mean Story: Part Five

Way too late last fall, I started to start building a pond.  It ended up way bigger than originally planned.  Here is part five of the saga.  Part one starts here.

November 2nd, 2011

Near Tragedy Averted

6" of dense yellow clay packed down and primed to kill the trees

I was feeling pretty good about the hole being dug, and was ready to move on to liner then I had to stop again.  When I hired the guys to dig out the rest of the pond, I didn't watch them every second.  When I first looked at the site when they were done, all looked great.  Unfortunately today I found this. 

The not so sharp picture is of 6-8 inches of dense yellow clay.  It turns all of the clay didn't get hauled away.  A whole lot of it got spread around and rolled over and flattened.  This is a big problem on several fronts.  First the clay is going to kill the maple and the magnolia that is surrounds.  It is going to suffocate them.  Second, the new grading is going to not work so great with keeping water away from the house.  I have to spend today and tomorrow digging this all out, finding a place for it and then laying down some new sod that you see in the picture to prevent the whole area from becoming a giant mud pit.  Two steps forward one step in goo...

At least I got the bottom drain done.  This needed to be set in concrete to prevent it from moving.  A moving bottom drain can tear your liner.  I am very proud of how this came out.  It was nerve racking because you had to get the concrete in while keeping the pipe at the perfect height and making sure it all was level.  Then the concrete had to be shaped in such a way so that there were not rough spots sticking up AND no depressions.  Believe it or not this thin little groove took 480 pounds of concrete to fill!  OK a bit of that went into the tunnel under the collar but still!  Getting 80 pound bags down into a 3.5 foot slippery hole without killing yourself is quite a workout.  I mixed it all in the little pink tub thing again because 1) I still didn't want to get my new wheel barrow dirty and 2) I didn't feel like trying to wrestle it down into the hole.

Check out the foam under the edge, scraping that flush was fun!

My pond is going to be a pit of leaves by tomorrow at this rate.

I learned a very important lesson about concrete today that I knew but had completely forgotten.  It BURNS.  Yeah fresh concrete can burn your skin.  I wore gloves when I mixed it, but they were porous and some leaked through.  I felt my hand stinging and thought at first it was just irritation from friction or something.  Nope.  In one place it blistered.  I don't even mind because this scary part of the journey is DONE! 

The Hole: A Pond Story Part 4

 This is part four in the pond building story from late last fall, part 1 starts here

It's dug-               From October 29, 2012 -MORNING

Hole is dug and collar is patched.  Now for the bottom drain.

    We have hole.  It is 3.5 deep at the deepest section.  2.5 deep in the shallows.  Getting it to this point created quite a mess and we ended up having to make multiple trips with a huge dump truck to get rid the clay.  Here is where I'm starting from this morning. Getting the little BD tunnel under the collar dug was a giganormous PIA. It was 100% of the evil rock clay garbage that oddly had gravel in it here as well, making it way worse. It involved laying on the ground and chipping at it bit by tiny bit.  I am almost positive that there must have been a simpler way to do this but it is beyond me what it was.  Oh well that part is done-hopefully.

We rented a trench machine thing to dig out the trench for the drain to the ditch. It sort of is like a bulldozer with a giant chain saw on the front of it. Scary stuff. Today's trick will be getting the bottom drain pipe right at the bottom of a 4' trench that is six inches wide. Off to work!

October 29, 2012 Night

Drat It's Stuck  

Stacy's Should have been obvious tip of the day: If you are going to use ginormous machines to make deep and very narrow trenches, make sure they are absolutely perfectly perfect straight, because there is no play for mistakes in a six inch hole when the pipe is 4" wide and ten feet long and digging tiny deep trenches wider sucks. Sigh 

After all day in the cold I'm about 2/3 done with the bottom drain plumbing. Which as a reminder is about 50 feet long. Heh. It turned out to be waaaaay harder than I thought because there was no room to maneuver in my slender trench, I kept getting loose dirt from the trench sides in the trench and good grief ten feet of that fat stuff is heavy and unwieldy. Also my tiny tunnel under the collar did not lend itself to threading the needle with a big fat pipe with a 45 on the end. <--Oops # 234

Trying to get it all right was exhausting.  Since it is drained by gravity is is really important that the pitch of it is correct.  Water left standing in the pipe will be bad.  However lifting those huge sections of pipe in and out of that narrow trench made it really tempting to just start taking short cuts.  I didn't but was tempted.  I was crying at one point, and threw a shovel across the yard at another.  :)

Got leaves? 

 After much fussing and whining, and threatening Spazzy McDrool with the pound if he kicked more dirt in my trench, I think I finally have it all pitched right. Tomorrow I hope to finish final connections, backfill it all, concrete the drain in, get the mud pile covered with a thick topping of mulch so the dog stops dragging it all into the house and them maybe Monday underlayment and liner?<<--{This is so not close to what really will likely get done but it's fun to dream.} Tomorrow morning is shot due to the squirt's hockey game. Fingers crossed afternoon weather is good.

Stacy

The Hole: A Pond Story -Part 3

The continuing tale of the project I started way too late last summer. Part one starts here.

October 24th, 2011

That's a Big Hole!.

The project persists despite the caw caw caw of the stupid bird that is driving me to madness with his non-stop caw caw cawing the second I go out to work. If I had a slingshot....

Leaves coming down hard.  Time is running out!

  I have been working on this thing every single day. The plumbing for the pump pit is now about half done. I did it all myself if you don't count the dozen threads I started elsewhere asking questions about the minutiae of PVC. I've learned that gluing the PVC is the easy part, getting it all the right height, not so much. In pond building, apparently if you go down with the pipe and then go up YOU MUST NOT GO BACK DOWN AGAIN OR ELSE!!! This repeated mantra on the ponding forums had me so paranoid I went out and got a super long level, which worked great until I left it on the driveway and ran over with my car later that day.

The concrete collar seemingly went in without a hitch. Unfortunately now that the forms are removed, turns out the hitch was absent but the holes were not. Holes, lots of them. They say they are going to fix them by grinding down the rough edges and filling the holes. I am predicting a lot of mess in that process.

The rough spots in the collar are very apparent at the back of the picture.

So anyway, I started digging the hole and OMG it was hard. The first six inches or so was easy. I gleefully dug predicting completion by the end of the day. I was fantasizing about writing a post on the pond forums telling them all what big whiners they were. Then I hit IT. The initial foot of clay wasn't so bad. Really heavy but you could get a shovel into it.  Still I had to sort of get up close to the shovel head with both hands to try and lift it up.  It was really heavy and it got worse fast.  After the clay layer became pretty much like rock. The only way to get it broken was with a pick axe. I gave it everything I had but between the rock hard clay and the increasing difficulty of lifting it higher and higher to get it out of the hole it quickly apparent that I would be digging my grave if I tried to do the whole thing myself. Never mind the whole issue with trying to find places to stash the dirt.   I like my spine intact so I pursued hiring out the rest of the dig.

That involved a lot of waiting.  Waiting and waiting. But today they finally came! My site was nice and neat before they arrived. Now, not so much. Oh well, pace has picked up so that's good because I need to get the pace picked up!  The leaves are starting to fall hard now.

The area is now a completely horrible place for the dog.  He love climbing the dirt mound and he loves hanging in the hole.  I knew he had some varmit genes in him. Purebred my heiny.

Oh look!  Post in the wall not so cleverly hidden after all!

Will the workers come back soon? Will the dog fall in the pit? Will the pile collapse? Will my spouse kill me for creating this disaster zone weeks before the snow flies and the holiday season starts? Stay tuned!

The Hole: A Pond Story part 2B

"The Hole" project began late last summer.  I didn't blog about it and am catching up now.  Here is part 2B.  Part 1 starts here.

Prior to excavating a pond that is deeper than a foot or so, it is prudent to put some assurances in place if you are going very deep.  Assurances that the walls won't collapse.  When I first started this journey, I thought that the water pressure on the walls was enough to prevent that from happening.  Not so I learned after reading about disastrous collapse after collapse on various pond forums.  This is why I decided to put in a concrete collar.  The collar serves a couple of purposes.  It helps with the whole collapse issue, it gives a level surface for putting boulders or edging on and it helps make sure your water level is level (if done right.) And it provides a fun catwalk for your daughter and pooch to prance on.

Now that I had dug out the collar, the next step was to remove the concrete posts that were in the collar.  Brilliant me had dug a drench that landed smack center on two old fenceposts.  If I had wanted to do this, never in a million years would it have happened.  So how do you remove a 4 foot deep concrete post that circles a wood post?  You don't...mostly.  Oh I whacked at it for a good few hours.  The chips flew, (and cut my forehead).  I took an ax to the wood part and whittled it away bit by bit.  I played some tunes and whacked whacked whacked away at it. Eventually I got it down to just below the level of the soil by about 1/2". This is when I covered the rest with a little clay and pretended like I have never seen it before. I have no idea if covering the rest of it was bad. I refuse to think about it. 

The next step was to dig out the trench again because by this day, the dog had destroyed enough of it that I had to dig part out all over again. Oh and go deeper. My spousal unit helpfully pointed out where our frost line really was and said since I was doing it, I should definitely go deeper {insert dark mutterings}  .  Here are a few of my notes about the whole concrete collar business:

Today's excuses for not more dirt moved.
1. Mom taxi services required x 2.
2. &^$&^$^& maple roots.
3. &^*&% yellow clay.
4. Not recognizing the miracle of the pick ax until hour six.
5. Shape not set in stone. <---this was the main one since I kept changing it.

Lessons learned today.
1. The Pick axe rocks at yellow clay removal.
2. I STINK at guesstimating distances. My planned 15x11 pond is now 20x12.
3. Spazzy McDrool LOVES playing jump the trench. He is also horrible at it, which means sides getting messed up when he misses.
4. Spaazy McDrool would much rather play jump the trench then cross the bridge I stopped to make for him to get him to stop playing jump the trench.

Then came the mysterious bender board.  No one in Illinois sells it that I was able to discover. After finally discovering that bender board is Masonite and finding a box store guy that knew what Masonite was, I was off to begin form building.  Here are the first two board forms which took pretty much a whole day to get done.  Once completed I proudly posted a picture on a koi forum and was told within a couple of minutes that I did it wrong.  WAH!

I really really wanted to do this myself but you have to know your limitations and I eventually figured out that I...am...way...too...slow to have success with concrete.  So I paid someone a decent chunk of change to do it for me.  It seemed like it went OK on the initial inspection.  We excitedly carved our names in it and carefully covered it with plastic to get it to cure properly.    It looks so nice and smooth right?

Sigh.  They didn't do a good job tamping it down or setting the interior forms.  There were gaps, and holes and boy or boy was the spousal unit PO'd!  My main concern was all the sharp edges.  They don't mix very well with rubber liners.  Oh and I forgot to have them put in the overflow pipe-drat.  At this point we were getting well into fall and I started toying with the idea of bagging the rest of this project until spring.  I didn't but I can't remember what my logic was for it.  

I think it was that I wanted them to fix the problems before winter so I didn't have to worry about it for months.

Part 3 continues here.