Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Renovating a Pond or Lake? New property-Old Pond Advice

Recently purchased property with a 0.75 acre pond. We have only owned the property for a little over a month now. My plan is to build a house in the future with the pond as a significant part of our back yard. I haven't had a moment to get in the pond and do much inspection of water depth, fish stocking, etc. Currently I know the following:

1. Levee does have a leak as there is a water hole at the base that has stayed wet since I have owned the property.

2. Levee has deciduous trees of all sizes growing on it (sweet gum, red and white oak, elm)

3. Levee has a major washout due to the fact there is no drain built into the pond. On the pond side the washout is not very significant but as water has flowed down the opposite side of the levee downhill from pond it has created a large trench which washed another deep hole in a woods road on the bank of a perennial stream which flows through the property.

4. Pond bank is covered approx. 50-60% of buck brush in the waters edge. The land around the pond is surrounded by a ~50 foot strip of dense trees and underbrush.

5. When I first looked at the property the pond was covered with thick duckweed. This winter 90% of DW has washed out of the pond via levee washout.

6. Pond is downhill from a large cattle and horse pasture with a livestock pond less than 70 yards from my pond.

My primary concern is with the condition of the levee. I want to resolve the washout immediately as the levee also provides easy access to the back part of the property. However I am considering draining the pond, cutting trees from levee then rebuild with a proper overflow system.

Should I be concerned with the flow washout from the neighbors livestock pond and pasture? Is there any way to filter this such as a gravel berm?

Im sorry to write such a long book. After writing all my observations down I now see I have a lot of work to do specifically with my pond. As previously stated I hope to be able to clean this pond up to make a nice backyard feature for my family. I hope to be able to develop a place for my kids and family to fish and enjoy.

Any advice or suggestions anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Sounds like a major project. I would start by dozing all the trees from the leevee and around the pond. Make it accessible. Also, I would redo the leevee to seal it up and add a drain pipe properly.

Tall grass would be the best way to filter the flow from the neighbors.

You seem to have similar ideas to me. One plus of doing it this way is you can stock the pond however you want.

i agree if you can, put in a proper drain system, and try to figure what ater flows you might get through the year.

Good luck with the nieghbors pond. If you are doing work mabeye you talk to him about his and see if he needs work done too. wink wink...

buck brush is hard to get rid of and strictly mowing may not do it?? might ask for more input. mabeye tear up all the groud and plant some thing new if the budget or enginewity allows.

As much as I hate to say it, I think I would take it out and start over. If you kill or cut the trees their roots could rot and leave voids in the soil of the dam. And with a bottom leak, it may not have been properly cored.

The duckweed will be back and it isn't all that easily to kill off. It generally takes some ongoing chemical treatments but can be done.

If you get a dozer in to fix the dam, is it possible to reroute the water coming from the neighbors pond?

I'm thinking along the same lines as Dave. You should take out all the trees plus their roots on the levee, which will probably mean an excavator. If the dam/levee doesn't have a good core, then it's better to start from square 1.

If there's a dozer on the place, use it to clear the brush around the pond. Leave a few trees for shade but clear the area out. Once the grass starts growing, you won't want to bring in heavy equipment again to get the job done quickly.

For the neighbors, I'd try like heck to work in a settling pond and a filter strip into the pond plan, or better yet, find a way to re-route the water around your pond. The nutrients that's in the livestock poop will cause you headaches. If the pond wasn't covered in DW, it probably would have been covered in FA. The DW reduced sunlight, not allowing the FA to grow. If you don't eliminate the nutrient problem, and get the DW under control, then you'll be constantly battling FA.

Thanks for the responses!

I am going to have some dirt work done once I start prepping for my house build hopefully I can work the levee rebuild into that same project.

As far as the runoff nutrients from the neighbor...

Right now I do not see rerouting the runoff as a solution due to the fact it would take a fairly significant trench to go around the pond. The pond is the lowest spot between the farm and the creek.

The shallow end of the pond where the runoff enters the pond ends at my property line. Across my line is a woods road then the pasture fence of the neighbors. This does not leave any room for filtering on dry ground. Actually when I purchased the land the pond was at 100% full and had backed up into the neighbors pasture. Since then I have opened the washout a little more to drain some of the backwater.

I have read here on PB about how some aquatic grasses such as cattails can be invasive at times. Are there other aquatic tall grasses I could plant as a filter in the shallow end. Since this is on the property boundary and is very shallow I am not concerned with trying to fish from the bank in the area. I will also look into building a settling pond.

Just for more background information, this is a very old pond. I have looked at historical aerial photography back to the mid 1940s and it appears the pond was there at that time. (I'm a map nerd) I purchased the property from a timber company which did not do any management of the pond.

I am working on a map of the pond which maybe I can illustrate some of my areas of concerns with ( again, map nerd).

Thanks again for the responses and look forward to learning more from this forum!

Dear Map Nerd:

Do you know of any other mapping service besides http://acme.com/planimeter/

that someone can use to figure out the area of their pond if their pond was recently built (say a year ago)?

Using Google/Google earth, etc., in the rural areas, it seems that the satellite images aren't updated as frequently as the images in the larger metropolitan areas.

Check out www.arcgis.com. I use it quite often for personal uses. The thing I like about it is you can setup an account then map "heads up" on your computer save it then open it in a free App on your iPhone or iPad.

In my area the most up to date public imagery is the Microsoft Imagery hosted by Bing. Once in arcgis.com you can change your basemap to whatever you would like to see (try Bing Aerial). Then use the measure tool to measure area and lengths.

In AR our counties occasionally purchase imagery which can be made available to the public.

Good luck, let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks. I'll check it out when I'm on a faster connection.

We did some GIS work in a class I was in last semester, there might be a bit of a learning curve.

Maybe but after 4 minutes the site still didn't open up. I'm not at home, and in the evening Virgin Broadband is about as slow or slower than dial-up. I'll try again in the morning. I've been trying to send an e-mail that has 3 pictures attached for the past 4 hrs. and they still won't go thru.

I have tried it from here and looks like everything is working. Maybe it will work for you tomorrow. I did notice I forgot to mention you need to click the map tab at the top to open the map viewer. You do not need a sign in to look at the basemap and make measurements.

It took 20 minutes to be able to zoom to the closest level that was available (300' ruler) but the latest image that they had was from the late summer of 2008 right after I had completed the renovation of my pond, but before I had disposed of all of the dirt.

Thanks! Interesting site.

Hey Geomapper04 - I second esshup's comments - your suggestion to use ArcGIS was wonderful. On google maps the last best update on my place was 2002. And google always misses my property by 1/2 mile...

One of the available basemaps on ArcGIS is a Bing Aerial and it is MUCH MUCH clearer and up to date. And the tool got to my place spot on in one try.

Took a little messing around to figure out how to use it - but the quality is way higher than anything I have found on google before.
The measuring tool is intuitive and very convenient for me.

One thing I can't find is how to tell what the dates are on the basemaps - and if there is a timeline of shots (one nice feature in google maps) that I can adjust or inspect.

Thanks for the insight on the tool.

Hasn't all of this online mapping stuff made our lives easier????
I hardly get out my range finder anymore!!!!!!

As for the cow and horse run-off I second the other guys......construct some shallow settling ponds and plant cattails or pickerel weed. Just be ready to hand pull transplants in your main pond.

As for the dam...IMO to much of a gamble to salvage...remove and replace