Gleying a pond

So, last year my siblings, the kids and I tried to create a pond with sodium bentonite, and it just didn't hold water.  Either we didn't mix it in enough with the soil and native clay or else the sides of the pond were too acute, or a combination of the two.  In any case, nice place to catch water, but it wouldn't hold water and remain a pond through the dry months.

So now, plan B is in full effect:   'Gleyification'.I am about 3/4 of the way through the process of creating a 'gley', or at least, I'm almost done with my side of the work, because then it is the bacteria and other microscopic entities which 'go to work', as an aerobic environment is turned anaerobic, i.e. an environment with air turns into an environment without air, thus becoming impermeable to both air and water....  Everything changes for them: all of the little aerobic guys either go elsewhere or they die, and all of the anaerobic guys take over.

In fact this technique is inspired from a natural phenomena:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleysol

Though I don't know if it is exactly the same thing, but in any case it is what I am trying, and we'll see.   In theory, it seems to be quite plausible.   The Russians, I  read on a Permaculture site, have the most literature and experience with gleying.   Permaculturalists like Bill Mollison mentions it once or twice as a technique.   Often pigs or other propertied animals are said to be used to repeatedly tramp the pond bottom, greatly enhancing the speed of such a project.   But we don't have pigs here, so I was the one who jumped up and down and danced on the pond bottom!  That's about 150 lbs jumping up and down, on each layer consecutively.

The layers of my gleyed pond are:

--Native clay bottom, with mixed in sodium bentonite, left over from plan A.
--General garden cuttings and leaves, fresh and dried.
--Horseshit, with straw, woodchips, sawdust and eucalyptus leaves
--Maori Flax, flat wide end down, radiating around pond, then loosely woven horizontally
--More horseshit, with lots of sawdust, to fill holes left between flax leaves
--spent straw
--puddled mud made of local soil, local clay, sodium bentonite and some of the straw
--Jute netting, to stabilize the sides of the ponds when the rain starts falling!

Impossible for me to really tell, but I can guess that there is at least 8 to 10 inches of compressed plant and fecal matter in this gley.  Plus the 2 to 3 inches of rammed adobe on top.  12 inches of potential gleyification?  We shall see!    If this works, I will be very satisfied!

The videos below will explain my process, I hope.

Video 1:  Green cuttings then horseshit

 Video 2: Maori Flax & more horseshit

Video 3: Hay is for gleying...

It won't upload, oh well, I'll post it with the mud-clay layer video, for subsequent post.

It shows that I have added a good layer of spent hay from the local horse club, and shows how I have started making a kind of 'adobe' clay from the local soil, local clay and some sodium bentonite (i.e. clumping kitty litter).  I think I put about 20 big bags of that stuff in last year, and mixed it, more or less with the subsoil that we had exposed by digging out the topsoil.  This should have some helpful effect on the gleyification, if only to constrict air even better around the putrifying vegetable and fecal matter.  I also explain that I am going to mix in some of the straw, to make a kind of building clay that has a bit more integrity due to the plant's fibrous lengths integrated into the working material.

I am exited to get started on this final stage of ponding, where I get to act like a potter and play with mud!  But first in my little pond, separated from the larger one by a little stone and soil walkway, I am mixing up my adobe, adding water and digging a bit deeper into the clay.  This will take some time, I am working at it all day, off and on.    I will be left with a rather deeper hole, I imagine, which I will turn into a gley pond (if the first one works!) eventually, though for now just use it as a place to hold water when it rains and grow a few things perhaps.   Having two, contiguous ponds also allows me to separate filtered greywater from rainwater easily, if I so wish, diverting the greywater to the lower, smaller pond after going through the bathtub filter, which has plants and charcoal.  It also means I can feed the larger pond with the water from the smaller pond and use the smaller one for some water gardening!  Watercress anyone?  Maybe I can grow a small crop of rice?

I'll post more videos when I get there.

Hasta la proxima!

Simpler Thomas