Weekending

For the past few weekends we have been working on the field area in front of the house. These pictures are from the veranda, which overlooks the area. On the far left there are two overgrown ponds. Running left to right across the middle of the photo there is a rock retaining wall about 80cm high.



We redug and expanded the ponds with new linings and gathered lots of stone from the river to extend and redesign the retaining wall. The line on the left is for a bucket on a pulley to haul rocks up. I aim to make a geodesic dome greenhouse here too, the pole defines a 5m diameter circle. The outer edge of the greenhouse is laid out with sticks and whatnot.



The ponds are more defined and the retaining wall for raised beds is a lot clearer. The pole marking the circle of the greenhouse has been modified to indicate three sides of the geodesic dome base. The blocks are laid out in a shallow trench to be at the same height as the top of the pole in the center of the circle. The center pole is held firmly in position so that the three segment pattern can be swung round to Mark out the foundations. There will be a set of glazed panels on the lower portion to form a wall for the far side of the dome base to sit on. Also a large raised bed in the center of the greenhouse. I still have some work to do on calculating the angles for all the struts to make the dome, thankfully there are a few tools for that on the web, simplydifferent.org and acidome.ru are very useful sites. We saved all the creepy crawlies from the ponds as we redug and there were very few tadpole casualties. The next customers will be the toads, everything late this year, but even so they should be here soon.