The Ponds

  • Digging the Ponds

    Digging the Ponds

    Haffy has been excited about introducing ponds to our farm, inspired by Sepp Holzer‘s use of ponds for establishing water independence and ecosystem restoration.

    We decided to start small with a greywater filtration pond for our future home, and a green filter pond for our swimming pool.

    Bearing in mind global warming and our current water storage infrastructure, we are definitely planning on adding more ponds in the future. We will use these first two ponds to experiment with natural sealing techniques.

    Since we needed to hire an excavator in order to dig out the ponds, we also used his services in order to dig into the slope at the back of our land, in order to harvest sand for the cob building, and to make space for a future cob workshop. The soil that was dug out for the pond was relatively rich top soil, which we then used for the adjacent Hugel bed.

    Digging into the slope
    Digging the greywater pond
    An island in the pond
    Green filter for the pool
    Future greywater pond and back of the Hugel bed

  • Small Greywater Ponds

    Small Greywater Ponds

    For our grey water waste from the Octagon, we decided on a natural green water filter. Since there isn’t enough space by the structure for a large pond, we made two small ponds.

    The first and larger pond has a worm bin where the water enters the pond. This is the initial filter for the larger particles. Then there are plants to filter the water, in both ponds. The water in the secondary pond flows through an irrigation hose to water our blackberries. It was important for us to use a natural liner, and we choose Sodium Bentonite.