Maja Borkowska

Hi there! I hope you guys can help me, this ia my situation:
I have a pond digged in a very clayish soil. It's basically only clay, very greasy one. There is a little spring upwards, so it seems into the pond and there is a pipe for the overflow, the idea is that the water goes in and out. The main issue now is the lining of the pond. I thought that with so much clay it will not be needed, but when it's wet, it turns into sliding mud. So we have a lot of loss of water, so much so that it doesn't even reach the pipe for overflow. And the pond is very muddy. On top of that, the walls of the pond are definitely too steep, however there is no way to fix that now with a digger and hand digging in this clay is way too heavy.
My last hope is to plant some water plants, perhaps they will help with the muddening and water loss? I don't want to use any plastic, concrete would be one of the last things I want to use, bentonite is too expensive and I don't think it would work on this ground anyway. I don't know, do you have any ideas?

Thanks!

Hi,
I live with a friend that wants to put clay plaster everywhere in the house. She's done that before so she just went ahead with this in one room already. Sadly, it looks like our clay (our land is almost pure clay) is very greasy, or so she says. The problem is that it cracks a lot despite adding various amounts of sand, putting various thickness of it on the walls and constant filling them and painting them over.
Before us is a work of removing all the plaster from one room and making a new one so I would like to do it properly.
So we started to talk with different people about it and some say that for clay plastering, usually some fiber is added, like finely chopped straw. Do you think that would help?
Still, we don't have a effective way to chop straw that we do have so I thought, that maybe we can use sawdust instead, would that do the trick?
Do you know of any other ways that could strengthen the plaster so it doesn't crack?

Thank you

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