Good advice, thank you! I am a bit concerned about leaves, but also like the look of a pond up against a tree line (and don't want the pond to be too long and narrow), so I've been wrestling with that balance and what is the right distance from trees to pond. I'm hoping muckiness from leaf concentration would be mostly in the northeast corner, well away from where we'll be swimming, and minimized by aeration.
I am planning to have the excavator build the house pad and possibly also the gravel driveway at the same time. No worries about the bombed out landscape - currently it is a mess of weeds, so no great loss there!
For erosion resistance, would it be worth putting up a temporary silt fence across the main channel where water flows in from the neighboring property, until grass is established? How do others minimize erosion after initial construction?
