Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Property Projects & Construction Feeder pond?

Well yesterday my site draftsman was by to shoot some laser lines for a grade plan. This grade plan is for my wife and I's new house on the farm here. I knew the ground fell off but not as much as it dose here. To have our basement footing 15"s higher than the ponds full pool water level I will need allot of sub soil fill round the house. Sure there will be allot from the digging of the basement but we will be 56"s in the ground and 58"s out of the ground with the foundation.

So what a perfect excuse to build another pond. Tee he he.

My main pond is 1 acre at full pool is aerated 16 feet deep at one end and 12 feet deep at the other. Perch only right now with thousands of fathead minnows and some type of hybrid shiner. In the future would like to add some walleye to my perch pond to limit the perch numbers but understand that the perch and walleye in five to ten years will consume all the minnows faster than they can breed and keep up the minnow population.

So enter the small feeder pond. What is be best design for this type of pond? I have land and space and will make the pond as big as needed to get my grade all nice around the new pond and house.

Thoughts?

Cheers Don.

Don because of the incline we too had quite a bit of stem wall visible sticking out of the ground. We knew it would be kind of an eye-sore. When it was poured last Spring, I was like "Oh my God that looks like a prison wall it's so high", but once we got the logs on and now this past week we had the faux stone veneer added...the wall sticking out above the wall has "softened" a lot. Later landscaping, plants and bushes will further soften it.

Getting Coronado Stone veneer installed this past week:

Don cant help you on the feeder pond but Zep that looks awesome. Do you have a thread on your place? Getting ready to build a log cabin in a year or two would love more pic's. Don't want divert Don's post though. Thanks

R&R...thanks. It's been an amazing journey since we broke ground in Jan 2013. I have not done a thread about the cabins...since we are not doing the actual work ourselves like Brettski. I dunno, just thought I wouldn't. Maybe sometime I'll start a "Log Cabin in Texas" thread. In the meantime I can send you pics via PM...now back to Don's thread!

Zep well done my friend. The stone work blends the wall in perfect.

Our front elevation is shown in the picture added. Where you see the brick to the right of the front door will be 58"s out of the ground to keep the basement floor 13"s above the water level of our pond at full pool.

I will have the engineers final grade plan this week I hope. We then will see how much fill is really needed.

I designed the garage floor to be level with our floor joist so there is no steps in the garage to the house. You can see the small detail in the drawing attached.

Cheers Don.

Don, looks like its going to be great. I bet you'll have a lot of interesting LED Lighting too!!!

C'mon people help the man out on his feeder pond. LOL Just kidding. trying to get back on track.

Can you put the feeder pond in such a way that you could drain it all into your bigger pond to make it easy to move the forage fish?

The way ponds seem to always run out of forage fish, seems like an excellent option to have FHM to feed the YP.

Wish I could but I don't have the elevation they would have to be pumped if that is possible.

What is the shape, depth, shore line, that I should be looking for in a feeder pond? I will know more in a week or so on how much fill we will need.

I thought that I have been told over and over that my perch will in five or six years over eat my minnow stock. Faster than they can reproduce. So the idea of a feeder pond came to me when discussing my foundation height with the grading engineer. Just don't tell the wife yet Tee he he.

Cheers Don.

YP will not always overeat the minnow stock and this depends on several things. 1. type of or combination of minnow species, 2. if YP are fed pellets, 3. other species and numbers of predator present, 4. type of and amount of habitat as refuge for minnows, and most importantly, 5. the density of perch - amount of harvest. Each item merits discussion.

Since your location is Canada and winters are snowy, you should decide if the pond will have fish in it to overwinter or not. Overwintering fish in a shallow, winterkill prone pond is a challenge. One style of minnow or forage pond is one that is completely drained each year, allowed to dry out, organics to rapidly decay and restocked each spring. This style of forage pond has benefits of low incidence of fish parasites, low muck accumulations, minimal cross fish contamination, low water volume allowing both rapid dewatering and refilling, productive due to shallow nature, and relatively easy to seine or harvest fish due to being shallow.