The Pond

In the book Gaia's Garden, I read about a pond that recycles gray water and decided I really wanted to try this. My brother and I dug the pond on June 1, 2010, and here's what it looked like when it was first dug. It doesn't look like much, does it!

Next we put the liner in, added some dirt, stones around the edge (these three steps are clear in the next photo) and planted some local water plants, especially cattails which are the most important plant for dealing with gray water. By the way, toilet water is called black water.

After filling it up the rest of the way with water, we waited to see what would transpire with the pond. There's one downspout draining into the pond from the roof of the house, visible above, top left. The gray water that goes into the pond comes from the kitchen sink, the laundry, and the bathtub. The pond got black and stinky and the reason for that was the plants weren't enough to deal with the situation. Stopping the laundry wash water from going into the pond fixed that problem.

All the gray water can be redirected into the septic if need be. There is a pipe hidden in the stones that feeds the gray water into the pond and also an exit drain pipe if the pond gets too full. So far this hasn't happened yet.

Fast forward to August. The pond is thriving and looks better and better. Soon after it's creation (I was surprised how soon!) frogs arrived. I wasn't going to introduce any myself because I didn't know how they'd do in the water. It's obvious they love it and do well as there were around 50 frogs before the pond disaster happened. It was "the thing" to go out to the pond and count frogs. Guess we don't have too much action in our neck of the woods!

You can see how beautiful the pond became in the following photos:

Things were going so well I thought I'd try letting the laundry wash cycle drain into the pond again and see what happened but then the mentioned disaster happened in the form of two visiting dogs that swam in the pond and devastated the plants. I never even thought of it because our dog has never tried to go in. I felt like crying! Look how the pond looks now:

Ugh. It's now four days later and the water is just starting to clear. I've redirected all the laundry into the septic and hopefully the kitchen sink and bath waters still going into the pond will be okay. I can only hope that the cattails will somehow start to come back but now there isn't much time before winter for them to get established. It would be way more complicated to plant new ones with the pond full and with all of the mud that's now in the bottom. I ain't goin' in there without hip waders! Today I transplanted some arrowheads and water lilies and sat beside the pond and counted the frogs. They're coming back into the pond now.

The long-range plan is to have what's called a swale come out of the pond and help water a future garden. In hindsight, I wish I would have made the edge more curvy to have created a more varied shape and more bays.

All in all, the whole gray water recycling pond has worked better than I expected and is a favourite hanging out spot for everyone.

Permaculture garden #1 installed

Yeah, I did it! After collecting materials all spring and summer, I finally combined everything to make my first permaculture bed. After the initial prep was done it took two days of hard work to get the bed done.

The bed measures 10 x 15 feet. All the advice I'd read said to not start too big (not more than 20 x 20 ft) as a lot of material is necessary to set up a permaculture garden. I'm sure glad I took this advice! I installed the garden in the backyard where out current row-by-row, rotter-tilled garden sits. The permaculture bed sits two-thirds in the old garden and one third on the lawn. My mom is skeptical about this working out so she's going to keep working her garden the way she's been and I'll concentrate on permaculture. We'll see how the two compare. My long-range plan is to install a permaculture garden every year until the old garden and most of the back lawn is taken over. By then I'm confident mom will be converted to permaculture.

I used what's called a keyhole design as the path in the center is shaped like a key hole. Here the garden is measured out and I'm building up the end in the lawn to have things level.

In this next photo, you can see the newspapers and manure plus the start of the straw.

Here's what all went into this baby in order of layering:

• 5 wheelbarrows manure
• a 3-ft-high stack of newspapers spread all over
• 12 wheelbarrows of manure
• 5 and a half bales of straw and hay
• 50 5-gal pails of compost
• 2 bales of straw
• 17 5-gal pails of sawdust for the path

The newspaper part was a little tricky as once I started spreading them out the wind picked up. Thank goodness I had read to have the hose near by and I sprayed things down every few minutes and this worked perfect to keep the whole thing from blowing away.

Here's what the finished project looks like:

My little permaculture helper, Sugar

Resident garter snake checks out the new scene

Tuza and Jupiter like the new digs

Now all I have to do is plant it! There's only a few things I'm going to put in before winter and when I get that done I'll tell you about it. Next post will be about the gray water pond I put in. Chow for now and happy gardening!

The how and what of it.

A lovely permaculture garden

In March of 2010, my mom and I were watching t.v. and flipped to TVO where we caught the tail end of a program on permaculture. It was filmed in England and a farmer worked her land as her father did and was most curious about her neighbor's spectacular garden and had to check it out. She was amazed to find out that in this permaculture garden the yield far exceeded what she was able to produce with a fraction of the work. Mom and I were amazed too. It seemed too good to be true and I had to do some research because I'd never heard of permaculture.

I ordered three books from Amazon.ca:

• Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway, an excellent book and is my garden bible
• The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow which although has some great ideas, is more appropriate for a hot climate (she's from Australia)
• The Basics of Permaculture Design by Ross Mars which I found mostly useless for my home garden purposes.

Permaculture is the harmonious integration of design and ecology. I decide I have to try it and this blog will be about my adventures in permaculture from the beginning and will follow it's placement and growth at my home with hopefully not too many disasters. I have no formal gardening training, just a love of good, healthy food and the desire to grow my own so those of you who are of the master gardener realm will have to bear with my simple explanations.