biodiverseed: Stormwater Pond and Mallard HouseDenmark // Zone 8Many things have come together over

biodiverseed:Stormwater Pond and Mallard HouseDenmark // Zone 8Many things have come together over the past few days, allowing me to almost finish landscaping this area for free!I salvaged stone and concrete from a few local construction sites (after asking first, of course), and my partner made a ladder to the mallard house when we found some scraps of treated wood.I’ve been sealing the banks of the pond with successive washes of a clay paste, dug up from the subsoil layer. To build and plant everything, I emptied out sediment-heavy water, and I’m temporarily diverting rainwater from a rainbarrel connection into the pond in order to fill it back up again. This setup will be removed when I lay a pipe from the end of the swale to feed stormwater into the pond, but that depends on how soon someone throws out a pipe!I took some time to make the shape of the pond edges a little irregular (trying to channel that wabi-sabi aesthetic), and planted bearded irises, dayilies, lupins, perennial geraniums (cranesbill), and angelica around the margins (divisions from plants I had already). The hügel behind is seeded with small fruit shrubs, gourds, and as of today, a tall and vining annual flower mix.These plants join my two Asian persimmons, four multi-grafted pears, three multi-grafted plums (as well as several seedling oaks, quince, and a chestnut that I will be using for topiary work). None of the trees are more than 40cm tall, so the perennials add some bulk while the trees in the system mature.Inside the pond, I planted semi-aquatic irises: the local Yellow Flag Iris (Iris pseudacorus), Japanese Iris (Iris ensata syn. Iris kaempferi), and a Southern Chinese Iris (Black Iris, Iris chrysographes).Between the clay, stones, semi-aquatic plants, and plants on the embankment, I believe I almost have erosion under control. My last step to create a sustainable little ecology was to “seed” the pond with organisms from the local wetland.The algae and plant life in the bag is presumably what the ducks are always dabbling at, so in order to attract them and convince them to nest here, I need to have good eats on hand. Hopefully this little slice of wetland biology changes the chemistry of my system for the better.It took over two years to assemble all the materials to build this all for free, and to allow the processes of ecological succession to slowly begin, including planting trees from seed, grafting wild trees, building up biomass for a hügelkultur mound, making mulch, and slowly finding all of the stones and gravel. The fact that I’m not allowed to work in Denmark–and have been in immigration limbo for three years now–has more or less forced me to learn how to do everything in the garden from scratch, and not fall back on synthetic crutches like pond fabric: I am perversely kind of grateful for the way my situation has forced me to read in-depth about primitive processes like gleying ponds, so I not only build landscape structures, but also understand the science behind making them work. I’ve learned that biomimicry is the most efficient way to design lasting landscape systems.I look forward to seeing the system mature over the years, especially as blossoming and fruiting trees begin to become established.For more in this series, check out the Edible Forest Gardening 101 archivePlans for the Mallard House here. -- source link

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