excavator – Peacock Orchard

We are water people. I love everything about it, so naturally we’d want something to swim in on our property. Something lovely and looks like it belongs in the landscape. It wasn’t feasible before. Too expensive. However, the unintentional pond has shown us we can line a pond rather cheaply with materials from our own property. Wyoming is a leading producer of Bentonite, a clay that is used a lot in construction and pond building. I cannot say 100% that bentonite is the reason we made the unintentional pond but whatever that black clay is, it holds water. So we’ll be mining it out and lining our natural swim pond with it.

Stage 1 of this project is obviously digging the hole. Our trusty excavator is making light work of that. The swimming area of the pond is planned to be a rectangle 30 feet long and at least 7 feet across. The deep end will also be 7 feet. Our excavator can only dig 7 feet if you hadn’t guessed.

I have the deep end dug, for the most part. I need to move the excavator to the other side to get some stuff I couldn’t reach, but otherwise it’s good to go.

My progress was halted by the gigantic pile of dirt that had accumulated near me. The plan was to double team the digging, one of us in the excavator and one in the tractor moving the dirt. Kids prohibit that plan mostly. Someone has to watch the little devils. They also inhibit the moving of dirt as it is a premier play spot.

We managed it, somehow. The entire pile hasn’t been moved, weather intervened, but I can move the excavator around now to finish the deep end.

So once the rectangle is completed I will go back and slope the walls for the planting area. Make it a more organic shape. Then comes the lining with bentonite. That will be the toughest job yet. Once that’s done though, nothing but plants and parties.

If you’ve been following our progress you are probably aware of our driveway problems. Our driveway turns into a flooded, muddy, impassable mess every time a drop of water hits it. We get so much standing water on our driveway the ducks move out and swim on it.

Last year we used the tractor blade to make a ditch on one side of the driveway and dug drainage ponds in 2 spots on our driveway. One very large one to catch garage water and one after our treeline to drain the driveway. Neither of these were large enough to do what they needed to do this spring. Of course, it was an unusually wet spring. Still, we need to prep for more water!

Thankfully we have our new, beautiful excavator to put to work. Husband (and the stray kid) has been busy ditching on both sides of the driveway and deepening the tree line drainage pond. That pond is quite deep now and I was quite happy as I really really needed to plant the bamboo I’d bought during the winter. I really didn’t want to bring it into the house for another winter and it had been hanging out in a pot on the porch all year. So I used the excavator to dig a largish hole, filled it with biochar and compost and planted the bamboo. Then I took a seed mix (dry land pasture grass, alfalfa, sainfoin, nitro-radish and winter barley) and spread it out in the new ditches and around the bamboo and “pond”. I’m hoping this helps stabilize it from erosion. The bamboo should also help with erosion.

The kids have been loving this deep hole and I can’t seem to stop them from grabbing their shovels and heading out to adventure in it. A close eye will have to be kept on the little stinkers come rainfall.

If we need to expand this pond we will expand it northward. The trenches are quite deep and I’m excited to see how they work. All dirt from the trenches was put onto the driveway.

So, we shall see.

Tag: excavator

Natural Swim Pond- digging has begun

Adjusting Driveway Water Catchment