I feel like I've taken a big step in my Padawan Pondmeister journey... thanks to the Pond Jedi's and Gurus so willing to share their experience and knowledge with new guys like me. Phase One of my mini-pond project has reached a milestone! A pond now exists where there was not one before. smile

After attending Pond Boss VII, I really focused on clarifying my goal before I got started. After careful consideration, I knew that my real focus was to improve the visual aesthetics of my property and provide additional value to the wildlife habitat where I live. I love the idea of having a healthy, balanced ecosystem in the mini-pond that will support a variety of fish, but also encourage other birds and critters to visit and enjoy the land we share. (except perhaps feral pigs... I'm ok with them visiting someone else) Besides, Mike Otto says that "people are healthier, happier, and live longer with a pond on their property." Who am I to argue?!

The area we live in is surrounded by ~11k acres of dense forest, but our place is only ~6 acres. One of the first things I did was look for natural ponds near me as a general indicator of what the geology might be like. I found two that were within a half mile of my place (circled)...
East Texas Piney Woods

I originally wanted a pond when we built our home a couple years ago, but didn't want to prematurely remove some really large hardwoods in the yard area. As the seasons rolled on after moving in, it turned out that several of those trees (particularly a couple of very large oaks and large black gum) succumbed to the stress of the construction process. I'm told that moving a lot of dirt around with heavy equipment over the root structures will often take it's toll on older trees. That seemed to be the case here and I ended up having them removed as they were dying. This opened up a small area that sparked the re-ignition of my pond dream. This photo shows several spots off the back of the house where I had giant hardwood stumps ground down after their unfortunate "early retirement".


The next crossroads in the planning flow-chart was the field test. I arranged to have a backhoe come out and poke an 8-or-so foot test hole in the area the pond would roughly be to see what sort of soil existed. I used the tried and true Mike Otto method from "Just Add Water" (great book that I highly recommend everyone buy, read, and give out as stocking stuffers). After 18 to 20 inches of sandy loam top-soil, we hit the good stuff.


Man, was I excited when the big toys showed up! (maybe not big by some standards, but a darn-sight bigger than my Cub Cadet :))
Big Toys have arrived!

Deciding at the last minute to go ahead and take out three small hardwoods allowed me to squeeze a little more surface area out of the mini-pond and achieve a depth of 7 feet comfortably. There were some large underground root systems from my big oaks that needed to be yanked out and we wreaked some major havoc on the irrigation system and septic gray water distribution. Dozers don't much care about anything in the dirt they move... they just know how to move dirt and a lot of it!
Laying out the mini-pond area.

First step was scraping off the top soil to reuse after the levee was in place. It is amazing how easy even a small dozer pushes the earth around!


After the topsoil was out of the way, the key channels were cut along the levee sides of the pond. I never considered this would be required for such a small endeavor, but it was explained to me that designing the pond for all the goes-ins to not goes-outs requires careful levee/dam creation and that jives with everything I'm learning here, so watching the stuff I read in Mike's book come to life was a cool process.


After the levee was finished, the basic shape was crafted and compaction was focused on:


It took a couple of days to get the pond bowled out and everything compacted well. I had a small shelf cut into the inbound side while the equipment was onsite.
Finished slopes on banks and finished shelf area

When we built our home, we used Texas Rattlesnake chop limestone that was quarried in central Texas. We ended up with a bit left over, so I moved about a ton of it into the pond and made stacks along the edges for small fish shelter.


It is full stone rather than cut, so I was able to use some larger chunks for a little outline on the shelf... nothing special there, just hoping the water would be clear enough to see it once done.


I used the 2 to 3 ton per acre number to extrapolate 400 pounds of pulverized aglime for application before I started filling. I live in Grimes county and the eastern piney woods soil is typically acidic. I figure the alkalinity offset would help kick start the plankton growth. I'll get a proper water sample after things have time to settle in...


The Vertex PondLyfe 2 system with the paddles at the 7 foot mark. I wanted to place these before I started filling.


Here is my pea gravel shelf. I may put some potted aquatic plants on it, but it's mainly there for fish. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but hey... pea gravel is cheap. wink


The pond took 3 full days to fill with my well. This is about 2 days in and the water I'm pulling from 400 feet down is pretty darn clear. It would be a dream come true to keep anywhere remotely close to this sort of clarity, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Based on best case/worst case flow rate, this little mini-pond is somewhere between 100k and 120k gallons I suspect.


Here is an over-lay of the pond area applied to the original area shot during planning... and another drone shot from farther off to give a basic sense of scale to the yard/pond ratio.


I'm sure this will come together a lot more once I get some plant life and grasses growing around the perimeter.


Here is the pond full as viewed from a rocking chair on my porch.


...and another view from the levee toward the house.


Here is a little video of a test run on the diffusers (to see if I needed to balance the manafold valves) and an underwater peek at the gravel for the fish to tinker with...


Last but not least... if anyone is interested... I had a trail cam snapping a photo every now and again to mash together into a little time-lapse of the dig and fill. I feel like I haven't even scratched the scratch yet when it comes to learning about this stuff, but now I have a classroom in the backyard to do homework in along the way. I am still trying to get my head around steps between now and stocking with some fish... what to do/not do... how long to wait... etc. I think a longer term vision for me to add to the aesthetic would be to stack some stone along the back levee and install some sort of sump pump that would draw from the bottom and push water over different flat ledges to provide not only additional movement/oxygen, but a place for birds and bees to wash their knees. Since I don't know what all that will entail of if it's even feasible yet, I'm having a 220v circuit dropped out behind the levee with a small breaker panel for future expansion while it otherwise serves up a 110v GFCI to the Vertex system in the meantime.


Thanks for sharing this process and journey with me. I think it has really been made possible and come together largely in part from Pond Boss magazine, the conference, wisdom from Bob, Mike, and all the speakers there, the Pond Boss forum and all the awesome folks that drop nuggets there... I'm grateful. I appreciate y'all... my new friends and the ones I've yet to meet... for helping me get this 'ole can down the road.

Any advice, thoughts, comments, etc on any of what I've already done, could'a/should'a done different/better, or what I can improve are WELCOMED! ...and I'd certainly like to use this thread to keep y'all updated on how things continue... especially after I get into the fish stocking stage of this journey.

Thanks again! I look forward to hearing from y'all!
Cheers!
Clayton




96.85840735 percent clayton... the rest is just pi.

We become what we think about.