Hi everybody, I'm new to this site. There's lots of great information here! I'm hoping you all will chip in with thoughts for me as I embark on building my pond. Then I will post updates and hopefully can share my experiences to help others in the future.

We recently bought a wooded parcel of land in central Virginia and am having about half of the acreage logged. The plan is to dam a creek, which will flood 5 acres to create a central farm pond. We have an agricultural exemption from the county and already have a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. We also have a buddy who is a civil engineer who is advising us on the design of the dam and the culverts, etc.

The creek more or less dried up last summer during the dry season, but the narrow gully where we plan to build the dam has a 160 acre drainage area - a LOT of water passes through during a good rain event. The pond is going to have to be split into two sections by a causeway as we need to get a driveway into the back section and the pond will bisect the property. The dam will be about 12' high and 250' long. The pond will be about 10'-12' at the deepest, but a lot of it will be quite shallow, so we'd like to plant up these areas as wetlands. And we're going plant up the edges and surrounding areas to filter runoff and to establish some native meadows.

I briefly spoke to a contractor who specializes in pond construction, and he spitballed $150k to construct this pond. That's astronomically out of our budget, so I'm planning to enlist a buddy who has an excavator and backhoe to help me.

We're facing several challenges and several unknowns, and I'm hoping your advice can help us out. Here are my initial questions:

1. We have shallow soil on the property and the bedrock is fractured shale. We've been told to avoid digging down at all, just to build the dam and let the pond fill. When digging the trench for the clay core, how far down should we dig? I've read you should dig down only until you hit bedrock. But what if that's very shallow?

2. After logging, do we need to strip all of the topsoil and remove all the stumps and fill them with clay? Or, considering the bedrock, do we just leave everything in place and see if it holds water?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!