Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Building a dam Water Flow Consultant...

I've been playing the silt control game for a few years now, but don't know if I'm doing it right or not.

My method is to control the access of the water into the pond with a culvert. Then on my small pond, I have a pit that catches the silt before it gets into the pond. On my big pond, I have two culverts to catch silt and pits before the culverts.

The pits fill up with silt after a big rain, and with small rains, they take awhile to fill up. I dig them out with my backho and spread the dirt around in areas that it won't flow back into my ponds.

I say I'm only partialy successful at catching silt as on those big rains, the pits fill up and then I'm not catching any more silt. I also can't get the pits dug back out again if it's real muddy out between rains. I'm catching some silt, but nowhere near half of it.

My big goal for this year is to get more grass growing in my dirt areas to hold the dirt in place, give me cleaner runoff and cut down on the amount of silt that I'm having to deal with.

I also put some pits into my pond when I dug it to fill up with silt with the expectations that I'd have the land planted in grass and not have very much silt to deal with. Unfortuantely, I'm much slower at this then I had anticipated.

Eddie