Hi This topic may have been covered before. my situation is this. i have a low area near the edge of my pond where rainwater collects. in the winter. when we have alot of rain ( october to June) it erodes the area arround the pond and puts alot of silt into the pond. the lowland area is normally wet until about mid july. i was thinking of running drain tile into the pond to give the water a place to go. my question is, would this still be muddy water going straight into my pond or is there a way to filter it prior to going in? the other option would be to try and run the water away from the pond and into a field. this would be more difficult due to slope issues. has anyone had this problem and found a simple soulution? i dont want to run a drain pipe straight into the pond until i fully understand the consequences

Some pics would probly help if you have a digital camera . I've had lots of experience digging ditches and draintile to divert water but, every situation is different.

We had a low area above our pond that the silt basically ran "through" and into our pond. When I deepened the pond, I also deepened the low area, rendering it a "catch basin" now for silt, though I know of no way to stop "muddy" (silt in solution) water.

Thanks for the replys i will get out my camera today and snap some photos. i am pretty lo-tech so it may take a few days to get them loaded.

As a basic rule of thought, silt and other stuff that flows with water will usually settle to the bottom if it stops moving. Diging a ditch or catch basin before the wate enters the pond will reduce the amount of material that water carries with it. The more water flow, the bigger the hole.

The idea is to give the water a place to slow down and then drain slowly into the pond.

The simplest way to do this is to just dig a big hole before your culvert. The hole fills up with water and the silt settles to the bottom.

In heavy rains, I've have two yard holes fill up with silt in one day. If that hole hadn't been there, there would have been that two yards of material in my pond.

I have two of these on my big pond and have dug each one out three times. I'll keep digging it out every time it fills up. Hopefuly the day will come when I have enough grass growing that this stops happeing, but until then, that's all silt that didn't make it into the pond.

Eddie