Dale's Volcano Mound, with crater lake resevoir.

- I need to find a home for a few hundred tons of fill.
- I need a very cheap and strong elevated platform that can hold up to 10 tons of irrigation water.
- I need a warm wading pool that will get warmer than the larger pond.
- I need a raised platform that allows better cell reception.
- I need tons of rocks for various building and landscape uses.

All of these needs can be filled by heaping the fill into a giant pile, with a hole in the middle. The hole gets a rubber pond liner. A resevoir 3 - 5 ft deep is now elevated and can be gravity fed to the surrounding garden. This will be the highest point on the property. I've climbed a tree in the best spot. The view of the valley from only 15 feet up is great. I'd like to go 25 feet high with a base 50 ft. or so wide.

The slopes will be covered in wood waste and planted. A solar powered pump will send water from the nearby pond to the resevoir/wading pool. An elevated observation tower may be added.

The scope of this will depend on the amount of fill produced during pond excavation and building construction.

My tenant's excavator will do the digging. When loose materials are dumped onto a big pile, the larger rocks roll down the slope. Anything larger than a football will be set aside. This should amount to more than 5% of total volume.

Rather than just building a cone, we may do it in a series of terraces.

Only annuals will be grown until the dirt has settled and the final size is determined.

Groups of mounds will be used to create some of the most secluded areas of the property.

I'd like to eventually have several little mountains in a cluster of up to half an acre.

Sounds cool I would ditch the pond liner for a clay or gley seal. I would also reccomend terracing if you are going to build a mini mountain. It's like an above ground crater garden. Very cool.

James Colbert wrote:Sounds cool I would ditch the pond liner for a clay or gley seal. I would also reccomend terracing if you are going to build a mini mountain. It's like an above ground crater garden. Very cool.

Most of the fill is a low grade of gravel and silt. It drains out very easily. It's easy to attach hose tits to rubber. I will occasionally use a brush to clean the rubber. The human load in this little pond will be very high, since it would be used like a hot tub. Any clay based system would absolutely fail. I will try other sealing methods on large ponds. This is essentially a water tank without a lid and is vastly cheaper than any raised tank I've seen. I think about 10 ft in diameter would be nice. At 3 feet deep, this would be about 9 tons.

The plan is to allow a solar powered pump from the big pond to operate whenever the sun is shining. This eliminates the need for batteries. An overflow would cascade down a little waterway and return to the pond if it is not needed for irrigation. Whenever the tank fills to overflowing, the power from the panel could be put to another task(aeration) for a while. I'll go with a panel and pump that take several days to fill an empty tank. Then, if I leave for a week, there will be plenty of pressurized water on hand upon my return.

A water slide could be built onto the side facing the big pond. Overflow could be sent to it with a flushing device set to send a few gallons in a burst, to speed the swimmer to their destination. I checked out the prices on some big slides. The sliding surface is not the expensive part. The steel structures that hold them and safety railings cost a fortune. This is one step above laying a tarp on a slope with a hose running over it. I've seen a kids day camp do this. They really muddied up the grass.

World's Tallest Hugelkultur --- There are many properties being developed nearby. Thousands of tree stumps are plucked when roads are built. On large projects, a grinder is brought in. The chips are used as hog fuel for electrical generation. This material is sold at very low prices.

Projects that only produce a few hundred stumps don't warrant the cost of moving a grinder. Those stumps get hauled to the grinder in bins and a disposal fee is paid. My proximity would make dumping them by my mound a viable option. It's been a while since I priced any of this. $50 per bin would be enough to pay for excavator time to stack them. I suspect that I could command over $100 per bin. If this is the case, everything will be done on a grander scale. I would use as many stumps as I have fill to cover them all. Maple, alder and cottonwood would be used to cap the mounds. 17 Douglas fir stumps that I buried in a 10 foot tall version of this took more than a decade to rot to any useful degree.

I $ure hope thi$ work$.
-------------------------------------------- This thread is about the pond(S) that are to produce all of this fill. --- https://permies.com/t/26553/hugelkultur/Dale-Hugelkultur-Aquaponics-Pond-Natural