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Posts from Forest Garden Wales Blog for 06/27/2019
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Jun 26, 2019 03:57 pm
Nick Balmer wrote a fantastic summary of creating a clay-lined pond in the closed Facebook Forest Garden UK group, reproduced here with his kind permission 🙂
I’m creating yet another wildlife pond, this time in the [Ornamental Forest Garden](). Ponds are truly brilliant, they’re [The Dreaded Gardener]()’s list of [features for a wildlife garden](). For some insightful information, have a look at the Freshwater Habitats Trust.
I’m very keen to reduce the amount of plastic I’m using, by scraping the top vegetation instead of using woven plastic sheet mulch, and using a clay rather than butyl liner PDF for the pond.
I asked some questions on the Forest Garden UK Facebook group and Nick Balmer pretty much wrote a blog post. He very kindly said I could reproduce it here:
Nick Balmer writes:
Look up “Puddle Clay” and or “Dew Ponds” in Google Books and you will find quite a bit of literature about lining ponds with clay. The ones written for farmers will be better for your purposes, that those written for Civil Engineers which will mainly cover clay cores in dams.
Basically, you need a good clay with very few, if any stones in it. Brick Earth or Lias Clays work well.In most cases you will need to add water to the clay and the “puddle it” which means working the water into it, so that you have a stiff but “plastic” type of clay. You should be able to roll it into sausage like rolls in your hands. If the roll breaks in your hands, it is too dry. If it sticks to your hands it is too wet.
It takes a bit of practise and trial and error to get the moisture content right. There needs to be a lot of work done to break the clay down into a fine enough condition to mix the water into it, to get a material suitable for waterproofing.
This process used to be called Puddling. It can be done with a spade, and in a hollow in the ground, by mixing in the water by stomping on the mud. This is how a lot of canal linings were formed, when they had loads of navvies available on piece work. The Puddling process also used to be done in the 19th Century and before by walking cattle round and round in the damp clay until it became a homogeneous material.
A heavy garden or agricultural rotavator will do the job these days when cattle and or navvies are in short supply. I did this process for ponds in the 1980’s using an agricultural rotavator mounted on a Ford Tractor, and they are still holding water today. The clay, once it had been spread by a dozer, was rotavated, and then watered from a trailer mounted tank. Once the consistency was right, we rolled the clay with a mechanical roller. This causes it to bind together into a layer, and also provides a harder layer on the top surface, that traps moisture in the layer. It is very important that this moisture is trapped into the clay, and that it doesn’t dry out.
The clay layer will need to be a foot or more thick, to hold any water, and two or more feet thick isbetter. You have to cover this clay layer so that it cannot dry out around the pond, above the water level, or when the pond empties in summer with evaporation. It needs a layer over the puddled clay at least 6” deep of soil or subsoil, and preferably more. The makers of dew ponds used to add chopped straw to to their pond linings to help stop it cracking if it dried out.
Photo credit: Helen Haden on Flickr
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Jun 26, 2019 09:37 am
Inspired by Malcolm Berry’s talk, here’s a simple checklist of invaluable features for your wildlife-friendly garden
Inspired by Malcolm Berry’s wildlife gardening talk to Drefach Gardening Club, here is a simple list of features that benefit wildlife in any garden.
Pond: The number one must-have feature, water is essential for life. It doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be posh. For ideas, information and inspiration, look at Freshwater Habitats Trust, particularly their Advice Centre. I’m looking to use clay to line our new pond, as I want to cut down on the use of plastic.
Meadow: Even a small patch of meadow and wildflowers can create so much habitat for all manner of pollinators, predators, mammals, birds etc. I went to see Matt and Vicky at Wyndrush Wild Meadows (that’s one of their wildlife ponds pictured above) and the diversity was fascinating. I have a small “makeshift meadow” in the forest garden, which I scythe once a year to create hay mulch. Malcolm recommended scything just ⅓ of the meadow each year for maximum wildlife.
Hedges: An unkempt hedge is the ultimate in protection, habitat and food source. Apart from a pond, maybe. Make sure you choose a hedging plant that grows to the desired height and width, to reduce the amount of maintenance. And choose a mixed hedge if you can, with native plants in. For example, hawthorn (Kate Bradbury’s top wildlife plant) can grow to 8 metres tall, whereas the absolutely gorgeous native Guelder Rose grows to 5 metres. Also, grow some evergreen hedges for year round cover. Elaeganus x ebbingei gives you late spring fruit as well, and being evergreen is easy to manage as its growth is slower.
Mature trees & shrubs: Well, grow a full fledged forest garden! Any tree is brilliant. If you have a smaller garden, you can choose a small rootstock on a fruit tree, or a tree in a big pot, or smaller species, like the Chinquapin instead of the Sweet Chestnut. As for shrubs, I have a soft spot for juneberries and barberries, with plenty of species and cultivars to choose from.
Log piles: So easy to do, put some logs in a pile. If you have a neat garden, you can tuck your logs out of sight, they’ll still do a great job of providing habitat for a multitude of inverterbrates and amphibians and a food source for everyone.
Stone piles: The same idea as log piles, put some stones in a pile. Provides a different, less slimy habitat. If you put your stone pile in the sun, you may even see some basking lizards.
Stone walls: Slightly more involved than a stone pile, but the same idea. Also, a great location for the strangely fashionable (and edible leaved) Wall Pennywort.
Flowers: Yep, flowers all year round for pollinators and predators. Include some umbellifers for our smaller tongued compatriots. There is a wealth of information online about suitable flowers. Martin Crawford’s book Creating a Forest Garden has a whole appendix devoted to which flowers provide pollen and/or nectar and when.
