Well that didn't take long

It's been two hours since the previous picture and it rained for about an hour during that time. Here's the hole now.


It looks as though there will be enough water running this way to make a pretty decent pond. It has already overflowed the original level on the downhill side. When the water goes down I'll work on it some more.

Notice how much clay is in the soil there. It may take a few days for the water to seep into the ground.

The slope of the hill can be seen on the far side of the pond compared with the level water. It's not steep, but a lot of area drains through this spot from the highway on down. By expanding the pond and the diverting swales a very large amount of water can be captured here. This can help a lot with watering the fruit trees since our emerging orchard is at least fifty yards from any other water source.

Holes

Over the last week a lot of holes were made. The easiest two were for two bluebird boxes. These are attached to 1/2" electric conduit pipe. The pipe was pounded into the ground with about 6' sticking out. The boxes are mounted as high as possible on these without being too high to open and clean out. This should keep squirrels, raccoons and snakes out of them. Both are oriented so they can be seen from the apartment windows. One can be seen in the first picture below.

On Friday night we went to the weekly auction at Dinkys. I picked up five more apple trees to go with the three from the FFA auction the previous week end. Each of the eight trees is a different variety. Let's hope they each have at least one tree to pollinate them.


We have piled dead rose bush trimmings and cut off grape vines around most of the trees. Soon they will all have their own deer-deterrent brush piles. These will be maintained until the trees are tall enough, and have enough leafing branches, that a few deer munchings won't be a catastrophe.

While I was moving soil from the large pile the county left me to the apple trees I noticed that there was a very large wet area below the driveway. Water was actually seeping from the ground, and it's been more than 2 days since it has rained.

Well if there's that much water running down the hill, thinks I, why not try to catch some of it above the apple trees? So I started digging a depression. I'm not calling it a pond yet, because I may quit digging at any time. It's not much to look at so far, but you can get the idea.


The berm will hold the water and I'll extend it east and west forming a swale that will direct water toward the hole. Maybe our neighborhood tree frogs will find it a better place to lay eggs than they chose last year. If it gets enough water, and I won't know until after a nice rainfall, I may line it with a piece of billboard tarp so it will hold water longer.