
It didn’t take terribly long to tear out the old pond liner. Although it’s brittle and full of slits, I consider it very valuable still for suppressing weeds and grass in other places. It’s heavy stuff, still, en masse, and moving the sediment and displacing the small pocket of remaining water and swamp was dirty and tiring.Could it be that easy? Of course not. Naturally, there’s an older liner beneath the black, 5ml poly, only peeking out in places, and mostly entirely buried under no less than 6” of thick clay.

That’s the bad news. There’s much more clay than I thought. Also sand, and not too well mixed together. It seems once water flowed through this pond, and left considerable sediment over the poly layer, which had original sandy soil beneath it. Now there are distinct layers, and I’ve been hours slowly tugging and working out the plastic from between the two, so that it can be tilled. Continue reading Pond-tackling day!