The weather has been so nice, and I thought I was getting ahead of my outside tasks. It seems like we haven’t had nice weather in March/April for a long time. I had the pond up and running. I got a tiller this year, and I have half of the garden tilled and am almost ready to do the rest. I’ve planted peas and will plant onions after the tilling is done. I put the brush out for pick-up.
That said, I found a major issue with the pond this weekend. When I got the pond running a few weeks ago, I noticed a pile of dirt inside the pond where the waterfall is. Also, the waterfall was full of dirt. I figured some critter dug a hole over the winter. I cleaned everything up, and it wasn’t a huge deal. However, after turning the pond pump on, I noticed that the water level was dropping faster than usual. I took a closer look at the area around the waterfall and saw that the rocks were sinking. Apparently, whatever critter burrowed in that area went under the rocks, and they collapsed (hopefully they didn’t collapse on the critter). The rocks in that area are about 4″ lower than they should be.
I started taking the waterfall apart, but some of the rocks are really heavy. Brian offered his rock hauling services, and I’m going to take him up on that offer. But it’s not as simple as filling in the holes. I will need to fill in with rocks because if I use dirt, it will compress over time and sink again. Also, I’m going to need to use hardware cloth to prevent this from happening again in the future. But the first step is to undo the waterfall area and see what I’m dealing with. There’s a separate pond liner for the waterfall. I don’t know if there’s a hole in it or if it shifted and is causing the leak. As long as the issue is with that liner and not the main pond’s liner, it shouldn’t be difficult to fix. Since the pond wasn’t leaking until I turned on the pump, hopefully that’s the case. But, this is turning into a project. One that I had not anticipated.