I purchased an old dairy farm, and I'm not using the manure lagoon
for its intended purpose.
The lagoon is 220' square, and the walls are built 10' above ground level, with the bottom sunk 5' below ground level. the walls are earth, the bottom and sides are clay-lined, and they hold water.
The dairy used sawdust for bedding, and before the guy went broke he stopped using the manure separator for a few years, and as a result the inside of the pond is lined with 1 to 2 feet of aged manure and fine sawdust. I used an excavator to scrape out some of it; maybe 2000 yards of material.
The pond is fed by a sump and pump that pumps rainwater off of the concrete on the farm and into the pond via a 4" pipe. It drops the water into the pond with a 4' drop. We get 5 to 7 feet of rain a yeare here, so keeping the pond full isn't really a problem.
If this was your pond what would you put into it, and what would you add to it?
We're temperate climate here; that is, our winter temps are in the 40s, and our summer temps are in the 70s, with maybe two weeks below freezing and two weeks above 90.
The stuff in the center of the pond is canary grass and some small trees and stuff that is growing in a floating mat of sawdust and manure; the mat is about 18" thick and floats around; the wind pushes it from side to side. The light green is duckweed. THere's a pretty good population of bullfrogs and smaller tree frogs, and dragon flies and various insects.
