Rj Vinson

Matthew Nistico wrote:

Rj Vinson wrote:May I get some maypot cuttings or seedlings from you?  I am in Zone 8b, Savannah and Daufuskie Island.

Was that question directed to me?

Yes, sorry I am new here and still figuring out how things work.

May I get some maypot cuttings or seedlings from you?  I am in Zone 8b, Savannah and Daufuskie Island.

Thank you Nabncy Reading

Thank you Nancy Reading.  Georgia Power's engineer has seen the water in the pond as it was already there when he finally arrived to do the site inspection.  I heard from him this evening that it will take a minimum of two weeks from the day I pay Georgia Power $2,300 to relocated the power.  I'm going to think on it over the weekend.  This weekend we are expecting rain.  Georgia Power's take on the relocation of the power is that I would have had to pay that much to move the power if I had known in advance, so I still have to pay to move the power after the fact.  But then again, I could have dug my pond somewhere else and left the power right where it is if I had known it was there  And since it was a third party, a company called "Utiliquest" that did contract work for Georgia Power and not actually Georgia Power, I have to take up the cost of relocating the the power with them, not with Georgia Power.  I think I need to spend a little money talking to a lawyer...

Two days ago the excavator started digging the pond.  20 minutes in he struck and severed the power to the house.  Yes, I had called georgia 811 (call before you dig) and gotten, in writing, the all clear from Georgia Power saying that there were/are no utilities within the scope of work.  Four hours later Geogia power emergency crew had restored power, but it was only last evening that an engineer finally came by to inspect.  Its going to take "some time" for Georgia power to approve the engineer's proposed rerouting of the power line around the pond we have already dug.  The cable runs straight through the middle of the pond and is buried in a 4 to 6 foot wide land bridge.  If we want to, we can build the pond around the land bridge.  Geogia Power's engineer is fine with that.

10 feet down the excavator uncovered a spring and my pond filled within 26 hours.  Because of the water, I don't know if the land bridge is stable enough to hold the power cables.  What a pain in my neck.  I've begun moving the mountain of dirt from the pond site in the front yard, to the road I'm building from the end of my driveway into my bottom lands.

Any ideas how to proceed?

I started out vermicomposting but wild bsfl took over the worm bins.  So now I just bsfl.  I don't have to buy new larva every season, they just show up.  They get all my household paper water waste which I shred before layering into their areas.  I used to sort all my kitchen scraps, chop the stuff for the chickens, throw in the trash pickup the oil and meat and other things you aren't supposed to feed the chickens or the worms.  The chickens know I put the kitchen waste in worm bins and they follow me and beg for me to give them larva.  so now I do not even have to walk up to the chicken pens with the larva as a result.  since its hard for me to walk the hundred yards between the bins and the chickens I am grateful for that.  Someday the chicken pen will move to worm bins which live inside the deer fenced raised bed gardens.

All my wood waste goes on my flood defense swales which have been seeded with spent mushroom production.  Now that I am digging a pond, the dirt from the pond is going on top of the 8 years of waste I've been throwing on those swales.  

The chicken poop goes on the orchard, and nut and banana groves

The mammal bedding went into compost boxes for baking and then once a year they went into the raised vegetable, fruit and herb boxes.  But I no longer have mammal bedding to process and eventually broke down the cooking boxes and threw them on the swales as well.

I try to compost everything.  I don't yet compost my plastics as I don't yet have a plastics grinder.

I don't process my glass.  It takes a lot of energy to melt it down and reshape it so I'm not doing that, though I worked on a project to take it out of Guam's trash stream, cart it to the University, and have classes teaching students to make useful objects out of the mountain of beer bottles currently thrown on the mountain of mixed trash in Ordot.  Nor I am saving my bottles to build with.  I am regenerating a tiny farm on a bridgeless island that I bought a couple years ago.  The first job was to clean up the trash tucked piled stacked strewn neglected over most of the half acre.  One particularly dangerous job was picking up the piles of colorful wine bottles the previous resident had horded.  They were filled with water and insects and in leaf strewn piles I could easiy imagine venomous snakes hiding in.  This cured me of any desire to save my own glass for any future building project.

I have my own hoard of cloth, old clothes, towels etc which I used to sew into anything I needed.  But as the arthritis sets in I have less interest in needlework.  During the pandemic I boxed it all up and shipped it to my sister, the international missionary, who is living at a camp in Louisiana sitting out the travel bans in Asia with her two suitcases, which hold the sum of everything she owns.  She borrowed a sewing machine and is busy with all my lace, brocade, prints, silks, cottons...

I used to save bits and pieces of anything that held significance and then turned it into ritual art, but now that I have a cell phone, I just take a picture and then write about the feelings the picture invokes.

Before the pandemic I regularly invited people to  my home for gatherings.  I always had a giveaway table, where people could take any and everything on the table.  They could also bring any and everything they wanted to give away.  When the inflow outpaced my ability to store items beetween giveaways, I just took it to local charities.

Today the friend who is going to do the excavating for free (thank you!) and the landscapre architect met me in the front yard for our first joint conference.  The landscape architect offered her services for free!  Wow.  and Thank goodness because just the excavator rental is going to cost $3K. and then there is the cost of the diesel to run the excavator.  Also, the $200 a day for a man and  his machine to move the dirt around once we dig it out of the hole.

We made a plan to build a small swale upstream and to leave the stream bank untouched, except to build it up higher so that its level with the taller bank that is further inland from the stream.  

We've decided not to pull up the stumps between the stream and the pond site so that we don't damage the current stream bank.  To further stabilize the stream bank we are going to replace the massive pines we cut down with cypress trees.

How to get water out of the storm drain/stream and into the pond?  We are going to dig a hollow/trench to lay a massive live oak trunk I cut down to build the hugelkultur swale at the upstream portion of the pond and to divert the water into that swale, and then send the water that doesn't soak into the ground at the swale into the pond with a small drop, even if its just a pipe jutting out into the deeper part of the pond bowl.  My understanding, please correct me if you know different, is that a stream of water dropping just a foot or so into the pond will create the churning effect to keep the water oxygenating.  We assume that the pond will dry out sometimes and I'm fine with it being a wetlands when it isn't a pond.  We are thinking to put willow along the swale, and local rather than invasive species of cat tail and iris on the wetland buffer around the pond.  

I need to figure out how to remove excess water from the pond.  I understand there has to be a spill that doesn't send water over the dam, as water over the dam will undermine the dam.  We think we will try a pipe again, further downstream running from the pond back into the storm drain ditch/stream.  

I'm trying to think of all the ideas we had.  

I know we want a 3/1 ratio slope for the sides of the pond.  And we are discussing having a very deep section to allow fish to get deep in order to avoid being captured by coons or wading birds.

That's all I can think of now.

I dug a hole today in the excavation area and found two feet of beautiful black top soil and then grey clay.  So excited about both.  The top soil goes on the piles of carbon I've been lining the boundry between my lawn and my marsh with for the past 7 years, and the clay of course will be used to seal the bottom of the pond.  Also, the landscape architect finally responded to my emails.  Yay!  It was a good day.  

Thank you both for your quick responses.  

I don't know yet if I have clay, but I will dig down and I will go ahead and test what I find.

I LOVE the idea of having some pigs, but I never have because 120 yards from the excavation is miles and miles of 1000 square foot ranch houses built in the 60s and stacked 10 feet from each other.   I understand that pigs are smart and hard to keep fenced in.  Would electric fencing work for pigs?  I've been thinking of using muscovy ducks.  

Another question is about the pines I've dropped and there is also a big oak.  Could I use these pines as the base of some hugelkultur swales around the pond, or will that cause more trouble than help?

I own a five acre homestead in Vernonburg, GA, a community of 55 homes completely surrounded by the city of Savannah.  Savannah's storm water drains across my five acres in two ditches.  The first runs through my front woods, across my driveway and then down the edge of my front lawn.  The second runs along the back/lower acres behind my house.  Both of them feed into the salt marsh of the Vernon River which I own a small corner of.  You can look at Google satilite maps to see the toppo of my home at 12880 White Bluff Road, Savannah, GA.  I have had this storm water tested commercially and have learned that its clean enough to water my vegetable garden with.  I hired a landscape architect a couple of years ago to do a master plan and she sited a pond in the front lawn where I regularly have flooding when the storm water over flows the ditch bank.  She identified three massive pines for removal and gave me an outline on a scale map on where to dig, and then dropped off my radar.  Its winter, which is when I usually do my landscaping work.  Without her to assist me I am turning to this platform for advise, ideas and resources.  Here is a picture of the three pines down, and the white line painted for the utility companies to understand the excavation plan.  I have already discovered I need to remove one of the lawn's underground automatic sprinkler heads and cap off its feeder pipe.  Do I need to have the soil tested for perk?  I saw a video where a small scale model was built in the excavation site to see who the system worked, but what other way will I know if I need a liner, or to raise some pigs in the pit after the excavation, or maybe muscovy ducks?  I'm interested in hearing on any subject, not just these first questions I have.  Thanks!