Monday 22nd April 2013
I had planned to spend today in the workshop, picking up where I left off working on the bio-gas digester months ago, as a break from the hard physical labour of clearing the waterway. It seemed, briefly, as though I might have an extra day out here, before having to return to the studio in Cape Town, so I could have finished the hard labour tomorrow. However, by working late on Sunday, Christa has managed once again to pull a rabbit out of the hat and arranged auditions for Tuesday afternoon. Since I have to return to Johannesburg for a few weeks, I decided that it was more important to get the waterway sorted in case we have a heavy rainy season.
Samples of litter causing the blockage
Having cleaned and prepared the channel, I now had to dismantle the “beaver dam” of driftwood, barbed wire, plastic sheet, leaves and other debris just inside my boundary. Somewhere higher up the mountain, last year’s bush fire had weakened a fence, which had somehow made it down here, poles and all, and tangled with tree limbs in the channel. The wire tended to snag the fork and rake I was using to pull the blockage apart, which was not only irritating, but dangerous. I was initially at a loss as to what to do with the damp, decomposing plant material. I considered adding it to the compost bins, but abandoned that idea for several reasons: carting it a wheelbarrow at a time to the bins would take too much time, it probably had all kinds of alien seeds in it, and lastly, yesterday I had taken a pH reading against the wall of the dam, where a lot of this stuff had obviously collected – the pH was so acidic it was off the scale!
Much neater!
The blockage had caused flood water to run around it by eroding the banks of the gulley, so I laid fallen branches, rotted fence poles and so on against them, then shovelled the acidic compost against the tangle of branches, followed by a thin layer of sand from the bed of the cleared channel. I’m hoping that the initial rain will settle and consolidate these into protective barriers before the flood waters arrive later in the season when the ground is waterlogged. I also left part of the “beaver dam” in place to protect a deeply eroded section of the channel bed. I had extracted a triangular piece of corrugated steel roofing and a number of rocks from the tangle, so I weighted down the sheet steel in the pit of the eroded “sump” with the rocks to prevent further erosion there.
It was after 14h30 by the time I collected the smaller plastic litter in plastic shopping bags and made my creaky way home for a late lunch of left-overs. Christa contacted me on Skype, with the news that Tuesday’s auditions had backed up to before lunch, so I’ll have to be on the road by 09h00 tomorrow to earn my daily crust. Next week end is a mess of public holidays, so hopefully I can make a very long week end of it, because Christa flies down on Mayday, followed by a visit my In-Laws for a few days. When Paul & Wendy leave, we plan to drive the Opel up to Johannesburg together for Christa to use as a runabout, since we have to drive her Namibian registered car back to Windhoek to sell there. Officially importing a second-hand car into South Africa is just not worth the bureaucratic and financial hurdle. While in Johannesburg I’ll be project-managing some overdue maintenance projects at the studio, so it will be some time before I’m back at Boggy Pond…