permaculture

[Cory Brennan <cory8570@yahoo.com>]

The cow manure approach has worked in several sizes of ponds including very 
large dammed ponds, at the Pine Ridge site I work with. The soil is silty 
clay. The dams have held water for years. One small pond failed to fill but 
from my observation over one summer, the animals did not stay in it enough.  

When gleying, the cattle go in and out of it over time, so are not always 
standing around in poop.  Some people fence them in - Bryan just put salt 
licks in there and they would usually go once or twice a day and often would 
poop in there. One thing about that is the edges of the pond get pretty 
compacted which is not the best when wanting riparian areas to really take 
off with diversity.  I can imagine that spreading manure and tamping it down 
(manually or with a machine) would work even better - and definitely faster - 
than the cows do, but we haven't tried that yet.

Here is a UN pamphlet on several ways to seal ponds.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FWqkYgACNoAC&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=gley+banana+leaves&source=bl&ots=3Ai7DeoomG&sig=r75aXujqxJURcE1dm4oDWx9uomM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0YcHT82OLo-Ftgf11qzWAg&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=gley%20banana%20leaves&f=false


I am familiar with a couple of pond sites that used bentonite and failed, on 
decomposed granite mainly. On one, it appeared that the bentonite dried so 
hard before filling the pond with water that it cracked. There can be a lot 
of shrinkage! On the other, it appeared to be punctured after it had been 
holding water for a few months. Apparently it punctures relatively easily 
(the UN pamphlet suggests this as well). In both cases, the clay was 
collected off site, at some distance. i would have tried gleying first, with 
materials from the site. They were small ponds, it would have been easy to 
fix them if it failed. 

I personally would remove the liner before trying to gley the pond, but maybe 
it wouldn't matter that much. 

I did research on gleying when wanting to fill a pond that way and found many 
articles about people doing it successfully all over the world - for 
instance, Russia routinely does it, and islands on coral rock in the S 
Pacific were actually sealing ponds with banana leaves and coconut husks, on 
that very porous surface! The article didn't give specifics, so I can only 
imagine how they did that.....

If we have time, we will try gleying a pond this summer - I'll report back 
how it works....

Koreen


________________________________
 From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org> 
Sent: Friday, January 6, 2012 5:12 PM
Subject: [permaculture] Gleying, bentonite
 
> On Jan 5, 2012, at 3:08 PM, Cory Brennan wrote:
> 
> Gley the pond with pig or cow manure, it will be watertight. At Pine Ridge, 
> the rancher there puts salt licks in his dams and the cows stay there and 
> poop. It takes a couple of years, but it's watertight.  You can do it in a 
> couple of days with a bobcat.

I'm curious about gleying ponds. We have a big old pond here in Sonoma that 
had a cheap liner that failed due to deer hooves and age, and replacing the 
liner would be expensive and a lot of oil. I've not personally been involved 
in gleying, and would love to hear details from people who have actually done 
it successfully. Many people mention it, but few seem to have actually done 
it. 

The hole for the pond is about 1400 square feet, 10 feet deep, and in a soil 
with silty clay, and shale just below a soil layer. The old liner is still in 
it, with many punctures.

I've done some pond work with bentonite, too, and would appreciate hearing of 
experience with that, as that is another option.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Gleying, bentonite
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  I built a constructed wetland for grey water treatment at the
Macoskey Center at Slippery Rock University in 2005 . We supplemented
the site's existing clay with clay from a nearby gravel pit (we are in
a glaciated region and the sand and gravel and clay is sometimes
concentrated in large areas) and added bentonite clay to the top
several inches. the first test only held water 12 of the 18 inches
desired. So we added  a couple hundred pounds more bentonite to the top
six inches of the 10 ft by 14 ft basins. this worked fine since 2005/

  We were trying to make a "geological" instead of a "technological"
container so we used clays instead of a rubber or plastic type liner.
Kept constantly wet, the bentonite is in theory self sealing, whereas a
liner would need repaire or replaces with inevitably punctured by
critters

  the system is detailed in my book Bioshelter Market Garden, A
Permaculture Farm .

  Darrell Frey