@VolNExile has taken breaks before. This has been a long one. She’s not only busy with finishing her degree, she’s singing in multiple choruses, volunteering and growing plants for the local extension office, working on landscaping repair work for her church post-hurricane, and raising chickens for the first time. I hope that she comes back to VN one day soon.
My neice and her husband moved to Ashville with the baby. They both work for Waffle House corporate and they asked him to go there and take over a region to square it up. It was a temp ask, but it'd be slim to see them go back to ATL. They love it there and are having a grand time being newbies and getting around. Hope they see a need to dive in and become a part of the community and chip in some where they can help. She's equally adept at decorating and DIY and interior design as she is her job.
Never saw downtown Ashville maybe once. Spent one week a year for 35+ years at church camp in Black Mtn. Did Biltmore a couple times & rafted the river a few times. At the end of the week the teens would go in to the bowling center to kick off the last night of camp and not going to bed when we/they got back to the camp. One year in my 20's, I fell for a girl that was working the camp that summer, and after road tripping to Ocala afterwards with a friend from camp that lived there, I drove back up to Black Mtn to have a date with her hiking over at Chimney Rock where Last of the Mohicans was filmed. Went into downtown on that run. Only time I recall. Been over a good many parts of Western, NC but never really explored Ashville. Even passed thru Hanging Dog on numerous occasions. That was my cut over outside Murphy into the Tellico River. Even did one of those crossovers in a '93 accord one time. lol. Other trips were a LC or Toyo 4x4. Luckily the river was low when I did the accord.
Unless you have graded in some tiered areas, my guess is the slope makes it hard to retain any soil moisture in the hotter and dryer months. Especially slopes that were at one time "modified" so to speak in development or something. The original top soil would be depleted. Not having seen your property that assumption is all relative to what kind of slope we're talking. A gentle or moderate slope could possibly make daming in a small pond feasible. Cutting from the high side and pushing that to the low side to build up a dam with some decent stone mixed in for stability, instead of digging a big hole.
This is not recommended but I know you can trick them if you have an open area. When I used to do nursery propagation we would see hundreds of dragonflies routinely hanging around the black weed barrier cloth. The dragonflies mistake the surface for water & congregate just like they would by a pond. They are known to do this near wet asphalt as well.
