I am looking at floating gardens on my ponds this year and thought I might join a forum to refine my plans and get some exposure to potentially new and different ideas.

I have 4 manmade ponds here on the farm all with catfish and one with large mouth bass. My largest pond is about 80 feet wide by 300 feet long and 14 feet deep with a small island in the middle of it. The next largest is just behind the house and it is about 70 feet by 90 feet circular shaped also about 14 feet deep. I have a triangular shaped pond in the upper hay field that is about 70 feet on each side and again about 14 feet deep. Then I have a small pond about 30 feet in diameter and maybe 10 feet deep between the largest pond and the upper hay field pond.

Looking to build floating raft systems and grow a garden on one or two of the ponds this year.

Welcome to Pond Boss!!

We don't have many members from Idaho, and it's nice to hear about your ponds. I'm pasting in your other post, just so others can hear about it.

Which pond is the LMB pond?

"We catch mostly 10 to 11 inch bass in our pond as well, though sometimes you catch a little 10 incher and one of the giants comes up and eats it while you are getting them to shore.. They take the fish , the lure the line and even your pole if you are aren't careful. lol.. Those giant females 26 to 28 inches are no joke.

We have so many bass in that pond that you can literally catch a fish about every 2 to 3 minutes, though most are small in the 6 to 12 inch range. You spend your entire day retrieving hooks and throwing fish back in. But generally with a few hours of fishing I can get at least one decent sized fish in the 18 to 20 inch range. None of has ever managed to get one of the giant ones in yet, you can see them and when they take your fish and rip your line off it is a bit of a thrill. One thing to keep in mind is that the large females are busy laying eggs in the spring and they won't even pay attention to lures until about late June or so. At least that is the way it is here with ours anyways. So you generally catch the smaller males and younger females while the giants hang low lurking. We see tens of thousands of young fry each spring/summer at the edges of the pond here."

Here are some pictures... I think I have this figured anyways... We shall see..

Me and some fish...





Some of my boys and their fish...




Some pics of the kids using the pond as their back ground. The big bass pond makes for great photos..

Great pictures!!

What kind of catfish is that? At first glance I wondered if it was a bullhead.

An attempt at making a floating dock after I got my sawmill setup. I can't find any of the finished photos yet, wayy too many pictures over the years..








The dock worked great for the first 4 years, but soon lost much of it's flotation, I did not realize that milk jugs would break down so quickly. It is still out there floating on the pond now 12 years after building it but it submerges a bit now if a person gets onto it. It was fun and we learned from it though..

Yes they are bulls.. I originally had them just in the pond by the house when we bought the place but we caught a bunch and moved them to all the ponds the first summer we were here. We were unaware that we had large mouth bass in the biggest pond by the barn so there are very few surviving catfish there but the cats are doing well in all the other ponds. Some very tasty fish..

That one log appears to have an amazing burl on it.

Welcome to PB. I’ve built several rafts. None were very good but I found that plastic barrels worked better than just wood. Short rafts are a PITA.

Yes it is quite a burl on there. It makes a great piece sitting next to the bass pond.

This is what I did this morning just messing around...





This doesn't have the holes routed in the plastic yet and I need to lag or more likely drill and drive wood in to make the end boards more secure. So far I am into this about 15 minutes time and no monetary cost. I have hundreds of these slightly punky white fir trees to use and several thousand feet of this fence plastic.

I am expecting to get a year or maybe even two out of these rafts. When they begin to get low in the water I will just pull them to the shallow marshy end of the pond sit them on the bottom of the pond in the 1 to 2 feet of water there and use them as stationary growing rafts there. With my eldest son and I working together we could easily produce two of these an hour so not a great investment of time and basically no monetary investment at all. I could pretty easily make 50 to 60 of these a year to grow in to start. It would be an investment of about 30 to 40 hours of my time but that is a drop in the bucket of what I usually put into my gardening each year.

I could also easily do these in 16 foot lengths as well, but for now I am going to keep it all smaller and simple at the start.