A creek springs up in Garfield

My neighbor had some old 55-gallon drums of used motor oil. In high school I did this science experiment where I put motor oil in soil and observed that corn in the oil soil grew much faster than corn in regular soil. This was not a big discovery, considering that fertilizers have long been petroleum based. Anyhow, I remembered this scientific result and spread the oil all over my clay bank:

Just kidding. That oil is actually silt, which I harvested from the alley after redirecting my new stream because a stream is good enough for me -- I don't also need a pond.


The source of the water is mysterious. I contacted the Pittsburgh water authority about a week ago, and they had guys working on it Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and maybe more, so I suppose that by now they are getting fed up. They dug a big hole trying to chase the water to its source.

Ideally they will give up and I'll have a nice creek to irrigate with. I made dam on the alley to keep the water away from my off-street parking.

The silt harvest was bountiful. I got only about half of it, after nearly 3 hours trucking it up the hill with a 5-gallon bucket.