Latest Pond Updates

There is not a huge amount of work I have been able to do of late. Being February, the weather alternates between freezing and thawing temperatures. I did, however, notice that given a full month of water run-off on the overflow of the dam, the soil was quite saturated. On one of the warmer days I attempted to build up the back section of the of the dam right near where the water had been over-flowing, and noticed that I was getting a "marshmallow" feel to the dirt. What this means is that saturated dirt underneath is getting covered with dry dirt--and this is not a good thing. The only way such dirt underneath will dry out is if it were to become saturated all the way through, or if you excavated it out, set it aside to let it dry, and then repack it. I chose the latter option:


Yesterday it was just above freezing, so I spent several hours packing this moist clay in real good and compressing it down with the weight of the tractor. I would just do about 5" lifts of dirt between packings, and the moisture content seemed to be just right. Anyway, it worked out nicely:


My next goal is to trim the side bank down further around this overflow and replace what stones I do have there with rip-rap (large stones):



I need to continue filling the back portion of the dam to the slope I desire so that by spring I will then be able to put the topsoil back in place and get some grass seed down. Moving the dirt across the property by tractor loader sure does take a long time, and I am thinking of some possible alternatives to speed things up. Anyway, here are how things are looking at present: