Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Soil questions Capturing more precipitation

Most of the fields in my farm have drainage tile, so I know a little about them. The waterflow part of the discussion that follows, however, is mainly speculation.

If I understand correctly, you're not going to increase the size of your pond's watershed, you are making the precipitation the existing watershed receives flow into the pond faster. A pond is supposed to require a smaller watershed if it is in grasses as opposed to a forested watershed. I believe this is due to grassland having a lower transpiration rate - trees transpirate (draw from the roots and evaporate in the leaves) tremendous volumes of water every day, which is removed from the watershed.

If you tile the fields above your pond and run the tile into it, it seems like this would move water into the pond faster, giving it less time to evaporate/transpirate in the grassland. So I think in theory more water would make it into the pond. How much more I have no ability to quantify, but the wetter/less porous your soils are, the more water would be available to enter the tile to and add to the pond. (Drainage tile in sand would have little effect; tile in soil with lots of clay which does not drain well naturally would have a higher potential for adding signifcant water to the pond).

If you tile, you will be adding at least the potential to introduce more silt into the pond than you have now. My field tiles are 50-75 years old and are the old ceramic, hand-fitted style. They have lots of crack and gaps; as a result, in times of VERY heavy runoff, I can see a plume of sediment entering the pond from the 6" tile which runs into it (to be fair, when there is this much rain, I also have noticeable sediment entering the pond with surface runoff).

The current corrugated plastic tile should have much less sediment entering it, since it is new, has molded joints, and is less prone to cracking (it will collapse if pressure is applied rather than break). The amount of additional sediment going into your pond should be negligable if you use the slotted (holes like this: l) as opposed to holed (holes like this: O) plastic tile.