Although a little frog moved into my pond excavation overnight, I know the water level is currently dependent on groundwater height.  In other words, if it ever stops raining constantly, our groundwater will drop and our "pond" will dry up.  Time to experiment with sealing the pond!

From what I've read, the first step in making a liner-less pond that will stay wet is to choose the right area where the soil is rich in clay and the groundwater is high.  That part's easy in our swamp.  As I dug my hole Saturday evening, I could tell I was hitting groundwater because the mud on my shovel became nearly too heavy for me to lift.  An hour after stopping, water was already trickling in to fill the hole.

By Sunday morning, the pond had filled to a depth of nine inches.  It did rain in the night, but only lightly, and I'm sure the majority of this water simply seeped into my pit through the walls.

Found water is exciting, but I want my pit to hold water even during droughts.  And I'd prefer it to be fillable above the groundwater level.  In Earth Ponds, Tim Matson reports that most liner-less ponds nowadays achieve their water-holding abilities by compacting the soil with heavy equipment.  But before we had bulldozers, people were still building ponds.  As the water slowly seeped into the hole, these old-timey farmers turned livestock into the pond area and let them trample the mud with their hooves, sometimes adding hay and/or manure to combine gleying action with the compaction.  They often had to repeat the procedure at intervals as water levels rose.

We don't have a handy herd of cattle (and I don't think you could fit even one cow in my little hole), so I decided to mimic their action myself.  Rather than hay, I tossed in an armload of jewelweed...

...and jumped in to trample the organic matter into the mud!

Here's where I realized one flaw in my pond design.  I wanted to make the bottom deep and to provide a shallower ledge around that center for emergent plants, but my pond is too small to provide a gentle slope between the two levels.  As I trampled, I realized I'd be able to seal the bottom of each tier, but not the steep walls in between.  We'll see if this dooms my project to leaky failure.

Here's my jewelweed fermentation pit after trampling an armload of greenery into the water-holding portion and another into the soggy tier closest to the camera.  If the water level continues to rise, I'll repeat the endeavor with other parts of the pit.

I'm having fun experimenting with small-scale pond sealing, but I'm also prepared to change over to a liner if necessary.  In my mind, this pond is already full of lotuses, arrowheads, and goldfish, and I'm prepared to drop $100 to make that happen.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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