Clay Ponds and Puddling

One of the really good outcomes of the Introduction to Permaculture Design course I went to at Barrack's Lane Community Garden this summer was meeting a group of like-minded local people, who wanted to explore and use the principles of permaculture in their day-to-day lives.  Eka Morgan was on the course, and wanted to build a natural clay pond in her garden - she had the bright (and very permaculture)  idea of turning this into an opportunity for a group of people to learn about this old but largely neglected technique for creating ponds. Clive Leeke led the course. We'd Clive met on the permaculture course, he has been building clay ponds for decades, and is one of the few people who knows enough about this technique to teach it. Four of us shared the cost of his time for a day, and on Sunday we turned up at Eka's garden with spades, gloves, wellington boots, and a lot of energy. The spades, gloves, wellingtons were fine - the energy was just enough, this is tough work!

We started with Clive giving us a brief overview of the essentials - siting the pond, its aspect, depths and levels that are wildlife- and plant-friendly, and most importantly, types and sources of clay which are suitable for this technique.

However, Clive's a man for action, so we didn't spend too much time on the preliminaries, and were soon (and literally) knee-deep in the practicalities. Eka showed us the site she'd chosen and started to excavate. It was a good choice, so two of us set about deepening and widening the excavation. The other two started digging and barrow- ing the tonne of  clay which Eka had delivered to the front of her terrace house. This is the stuff you make pots from - more or less. It's just as gloopy and hard to manipulate, but probably has more mineral impurities than the average potter would tolerate. But not easy to dig from a bulk-bag into wheel-barrow.

Then the exciting stuff began - Clive showed us how to  'puddle' 'tiles' from the sticky grey mass in front of us - break a bit off, about the size of tennis ball, or two, and tread it with boots to a irregular but roughly circular tile about 2 or 3 cm thick. As you can see from this description, this is not a precise art, but a craft - you try, see what works, judge , and adjust.

We had a couple of tile makers up top, and a couple of tilers in the excavation. The tilers were hammering (with fists and boots) the clay tiles into the bare earth of the excavation, literally plastering  the tiles  by their own stickiness to the soil. Our aim was to build a solid and impenetrable first layer of overlapping tiles over the soil of the initial excavation.

This took a long time - almost two hours later, and several wheel-barrow loads of clay later,  we were finishing the first layer. It was 1pm, how were we going get another two layers done before it got dark?

Amazingly, we'd done the tough part. The next two layers went like a dream, either we'd got more skilled, or the job got easier with extra layers. We did a quick measure with spirit levels to make sure we'd got the edges correct, and trimmed the clay precisely. By 3.30 we were ready to fill our new pond.  But how disaster can strike !

We were filling from the water butt attached to Eka's shed - and suddenly the whole lot collapsed - not quite the shed, but the plinth, the butt, and the pipes. Oh those cute foxes, what damage they can do with their underground tunnels and earths. All of a sudden our work-force of four was halved, as two people had to prop up the water butt, whilst the other two tried to empty its contents via the hose into the pond, before the butt collapsed into the (surprisingly) deep fox-created hole underneath its plinth.

We survived and so did the pond. We're  not sure what the foxes are adding yet, though we very much hope they're not eating the frogs!