The new veggie cattail bee pond

Is there a word for tiny ponds, like pondlet?

I got to work right away yesterday and built the little cattail pond. The hardest part was moving a bunch of sheet rock and backer board so I could get to the bentonite in the garage.

Here you can see how the bentonite clay shrank over night where it dried. The pic was taken a little after noon and it's been partially cloudy today and not very windy. Once there are more cattails in the water, we'll have less evaporation, but the plants will use more water. The 5 g bucket was almost dry after a few days without refills.

I saw ONE bee. Stupidly, I forgot to empty the buckets from washing pots by the house last night and several bees drowned and many were still swarming. It got dark on us watering and getting salad yesterday. So now that those buckets are empty, they'll hopefully move to the garden.

I'm very pleased with the performance of the sodium bentonite.

I followed the instructions at

I sprayed the sand/clay in the hole with water, sprinkled some bentonite on it, put some more screened sand/clay from what I'd taken out and then I decided to add screened material to my bucket with the bentonite, mix it up good and then add water and mix again.

It felt like our adobe, but much more clay and no straw — very slick stuff. I just spread it out and made sure that the rocks I couldn't remove in the back were covered well.

It also says at JP Self that it might take a few days for the bentonite to fully expand, but I think the water we lost was due to evaporation and what the plants used.

We also set the live trap last night. A beautiful corn plant was destroyed the previous night and we're thinking that it must have been a squirrel.

The trap was closed, but nothing in it — as always. Could have been set off by a lizard or small mouse. We'll have to modify the trap, attach some 1/4 inch hardware cloth to see what keeps eating the bait in this trap.

A big branch of a tomatillo got chewed off last night. We just took the cover off and used it in the lower garden for the squash and melons there. Fortunately the new roll of hardware cloth was delivered today, so we can fence it in again.