After leaving work, but before coming to Penang, I had one main project I worked on: The Pond. This is what consumed most of my time while I was in the Rural Northern State. The final work will need to wait for the ground to soften up and the temperature to rise. I think a good amount of progress was made though.
The idea for the project arose from an abundance of excess water. On the property there is water pumped out from the sub pump, but there is also run off water from a geothermal heating unit. Those waters flow off through a hose in the ground to a hill in the back of the property and soak into the ground there. Something like that. All I'm sure of is there is a pipe or two and there was water poring out of them. So the proposition was to do something with that water instead of just letting it flow out to nowhere.
There wasn't any design plan in place when I started so I came up with my own ideas. I wanted it to look natural as much as possible and blend into the landscape. Also, I was intent on not wasting too many resources or for the system to require anything mechanical or unnatural.
When I came into the picture there was a lot of brush and a big swampy mud pit at the bottom of this hill. There was a strip of pond liner that started at the end of the hose that ran down the hill to the swamp at the bottom. There were rocks on the pond liner. It created a sort of waterfall effect. You can almost see the hose here where the hill starts to curve over in that cleared area.
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| Straight down. |
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| Dagoba at the bottom. |
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| Looking up. |
So the first thing I needed to do was clear a lot of the brush away. That would give me room to work and leave a nice view of the pond once it was done. I set to work with hand tools. There may have been some device that would do the work quicker and more noisily, but I had time and needed the workout. The clearing was done using shears and occasionally a saw.
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| After some clearing of the right side. |
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| And of the left side. |
After I had cleared away a lot of the brush it was time to get started with the digging. I was told that I had 10 feet by 50 feet of pond liner to work with. So using those dimensions I created a plan in my head. To get down in there I needed to divert the water though. Otherwise it would have been like trying to dig my way out of the middle of some quicksand. Some people thought it would be fun to dig the hole with one of those big excavators. Instead, I used a shovel.
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| Hose been messing around down here? |
I kept on digging and removing brush as I went through the process. Eventually the form of the pond started to take shape. I removed the rocks from the liner so that I could re-position the waterfall. It looks a little like a heart. Because I love you.
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| Removing rocks from the liner. |
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| Holy crap. |
Then with some help I got the main pond liner in place. Doing so ended up creating a leak in the leaky hose I was using, so I let the pond fill up then. In retrospect, I probably should have worked on it a bit more before letting the water in.
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| Full filling. |
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| Overflow will connect with the creek. |
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| The overflow will look like a small stream. |
There were a lot of rocks used in this project. The huge ones were pulled from the property. The medium sized ones were from a local farmer's field. The smallest ones were purchased from a rock store.
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| Starting to look more natural. |
You can see here a lot more of the last brush has been cleared. It has turned Fall and the leaves are on the ground and in the pond.
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| Leaf me alone. |
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| This is Mo. |
The medium sized rocks were stacked along the inner wall of the pond so that the little stones on top could rest on them and not fall into the pond. By this time it was getting cold outside at nights and my hands would freeze when placing the rocks in the water.
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| Cold water. |
And then the snow came. The project would have to be halted for the season.
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| Snow break. |
I'm pretty proud of this work. I'm not sure what it looks like to you, but thanks to the help of computer projections I have an idea what it will looks like come spring time.
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| Photo from wlcutler @ flickr |
