The beginnings of a natural pond

I posted on my Mastodon account about wanting to add a natural unlined pond to my garden and a couple of people expressed interest in following the progress. I have been wanting to properly start this blog for a while so why not start with this.

So, operation natural pond stage one took place today: digging a test hole. The final pond will be a minimum of 60 cm depth so we thought why not have a look at what the soil is like down to that depth so we dug the test hole to around 60 cm deep and 30 cm wide.

The soil there is mostly red clay. I tested the ratio of clay to sand and organic matter by taking a chunk and mixing it with water in a jar then leaving it to settle. There was a thin layer of sand, little organic matter (we removed the top soil) and mostly clay. I also did the sausage test which involves mixing the soil with water and seeing if you can roll it in to a sausage without it breaking apart then holding it up to see if it breaks off. It did indeed roll in to a sausage and didn’t break off so it’s looking promising so far. Now to see how much it drains. Adam had the idea of using the sack barrow that we use to move big heavy coffee sacks (70 kg) to transport the water butts (120 kg when full). He got quite wet from the sloshing in the process but it did make it much quicker to fill then going backwards and forwards with buckets).

We covered it over with mesh because the sides are currently very steep and there have been some hedgehogs ambling about over the last few weeks.