there is an old pond on the property. it is about 300 meters away from the house & about halfway to the hollow. it has spent the last ten or so years collecting oak leaves. mike & i started digging it out last night. the tractor has a scoop on the back. in theory it scrapes a little of the mud up and gets dumped in a fashion to help divert more rain water in. but it mostly gets stuck in the muck. we got 5 or 6 scoops (the size of a wheel barrow) out last night. it became obvious we were trying to drive out of the pond/mud-hole while the edges were too steep and crowded with scrub trees. we went after the chainsaw and mostly cleared the best egress. the next morning we finished clearing brush and started digging the pond. mike's tractor is an extension of his being he drove that thing in around and all over. it was sketchy a few times and we almost quit but i'd shovel more weight in the bucket and throw dry dirt into the spinning tire tracks. finally after a nerve racking 5 hours we cleared it.
next we went to the farm (where mikes cattle are) to dig one of those ponds. it was easy going mike hardly spun his tires. after the first scoop it became obvious that the moist dirt was excellent top soil. neither of us able to overlook this bounty started to load it into the trailer.
lots of hand digging necessary to get the trailer full. we took the load up to the house and scattered it across our garden area (3 cubic yards or so). i decided that i only had another load left in me so we went back to the pond and filled the trailer again. i hung around (resting) while mike dug the rest of the pond and piled the bounty for future access.the second trailer i unloaded (mostly alone) around the fence for flower beds and more into the garden area.
i am so sore this morning (i guess i shoveled 6 cubic yards of dirt yesterday).all this activity had to happen before the expected rain last night. YES, it rained and very hard. i'll check the pond to see if we collected any water for nimue this winter.
here it is this morning about 1/3 full.
2 comments:
we have a watering hole in our pasture that we need to clean out in similar fashion...only, ours has tires and god know what other trash in it. if you got half the amount of rain we got last night, you're well on your way to filling it back up!
That looks like it will be a lot of fun for the kids when it's all full!
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