[NR] Pond Puddling - Chapter 566 (Patreon)

After that, Rosha and Courtney hang out at the clearing for a few days, mostly helping with the soon to be pond. After all, there is more to a pond than a pit in the ground and some stagnant water. You need the proper kind of ground and some kind of flow. Of course, this does mean you might luck into making a pond, sometimes by accident if you dig in the wrong place.

Jason, however, wasn’t leaving it to chance. So the first step was to test the soil itself. Simple enough, as all it required was a bit of the dirt, dampened and then rolled into a ball. Proper dirt would stick together and maybe be a bit gritty. If luck is really with you, then it is pliable and can be shined, meaning you’re working with what is basically clay.

Sadly, the forest dirt was quite sandy and even before testing, Jason had already guessed it wouldn’t work. Of course, it removed the need for the second test, which was to basically make a basin of the stuff and test if it can hold water. Annoying, if only because of how much you need to properly do the test.

However, it does mean that he was going to need to line the pond. In what, you might ask? Well, Jason originally was just going to use clay without much thought, but after a little research was still going to use clay. The difference was it would be “puddling” clay. Which is the technical term for clay with all the air forced out so that it doesn’t let water through if kept wet.

Also, it wasn’t going to be a quick thing because you need a good eight or so inches of the stuff for the lining. Good thing Rosha and Courtney were there to help. While neither of them used water or earth magic, that didn’t prevent them from helping move the clay with some imaginative use of said magic. This still wasn’t the end of course, it was still clay.

Oh, and this was the point that Rosha and Courtney went off to do some hunting in the forest. Why? Because the traditional method to puddle clay was to basically stomp around in it for a while. Dirty work that would have been handled by driving sheep or cows back and forth over it.

And while neither of the girls subscribed to the trope of girls trying to stay clean or avoid mud, there is a big difference between dirt and grime from combat and that which you get from purposefully stomping around in a mud pit. Plus, both of them would have to wear shoes for this as one badly placed stone could really mess up their feet. Jason, on the other hand, can stomp around barefoot without worry because of his inhumanly tough skin.

Plus, you can’t just put all eight inches down at once. You have to work in layers so it all gets properly puddled. This work took a while and required frequent trips to get more water so the clay wouldn’t dry out. Jason eventually finished this up and now just needed to fill it with water before the top layer started to dry out and crack.

Now, you can have a pond based purely on rainfall. In fact, this pond would likely end up that way as who knows what would happen to the nearby stream when things shift around next? For now, though, Jason has a trick he has been working on. It would have been a lot easier with bamboo, but beggars can’t be choosers, so instead would be using bark.

As for the trick? Well, debarking a tree can be tedious and leave a ton of marks. Or you can cut your trees in the spring because that is when they’re growing and the bark is not as tightly connected to the wood. But it isn’t spring, you might say. You’re right, except the key part is that the spring part isn’t important, but the fact that the tree was growing. Which could be done easily enough with proper application of magic or the right skill.

In this case, Jason used his herb farming skill. Which while not specific for this, definitely had a lot of know-how based on getting things to grow out of season. And so, after five more days of hard work, including frequent trips to the stream to keep the clay moist, he had a few debarked trees and an equal number of bark sheets. All it took was slicing a straight line down the tree, just deep enough to get to the layer that was growing. Then prying it off.

This ended up much harder than it had to be as not only wasn’t five days enough, even with his skill, to properly get the trees growing. Jason didn’t have the proper tool for it and so had to substitute a hand coated in Energy and a lot of effort on his part. In the end, he considered it worth it.

Jason had included enough leeway that, with those pieces of bark, he could make enough shallow troughs to get from upstream to the pond. Now, this wasn’t moving enough to consider using it as a water source, nevermind the fact the troughs are open to the air. However, it was enough that he could keep the clay wet, while it slowly filled.

It wasn’t quite another week, but what do you know?! Rosha and Courtney ended up arriving right around the time that it was finished filling. The only shame was that there wouldn’t be any fish in it until after winter. Though the duo had managed to find a pond out in the forest and, since Jason had asked them to, they had picked up some pond plants which they’d kept in a bucket on the way back.

So, with a touch of magic to plant the things, they all gathered around the campfire for the night as Rosha excitedly passed on how their trip went.