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Question- who/how did you contact them?

SetterGuy - sent you a message

Very nice construction. Congratulations!

The previous owner of my house lopped off the tops of four fairly large live oaks that were either overhanging the roof or severely damaged over the road. They were unsightly and not helping the remaining four oaks. A friend was in town and we went to work yesterday. Four new live oak log benches were added to the pond! Used 8ft old fence posts as levers to load them on my old light weight boat trailer.

There has been discussion in the past about SMB only ponds. Might have been Bill Cody. As I recall they did not work out too bad.

I have a SMB/RES pond but it is only about three years in so hard for me to give any long term advice. You could have that combo but the RES are NOT particularly easy to catch. Addition of the RES would take care of snail and associated parasite but they would also become some of the standing weight of total fish the pond would hold. So from your desires they might just be something limiting the standing weight of SMB (which are pretty aggressive to hook and line and easier to catch). Need more of an expert than me to weigh in on that aspect.

One thing I have noticed with the catch-ability of SMB. For me they seem to be easier to catch in a pond where they have to compete harder for food. In my opinion they are harder to catch (though still not that hard) in my SMB/RES pond than either my main pond or old refurbished pond, both ov which have limited numbers of SMB. Seems like when they have to line up against the BG and LMB to compete for food, they are more aggressive towards being caught by angling. Just my observation in the three main ponds I have.

Bob, have you and LeighAnn got the auto renew up and running with the PBM renewal? It may be time for me to renew my subscription but I am guessing as I am not able to find my renewal dates because I am now living at the lakehouse and have not moved all my paper work from the house to the lake. If you have not got the auto renewal up and running you need to.

Thanks
Tracy

Two to four months would be my guess, it would depend on the size you start with, how well they take to feed, and how much you feed them. I'm assuming you would start with 6-8" fish. I did something similar at my dad's old pond but put the SMB behind a large circular blocking net next to the dock instead of using a cage, it worked well.

Chris, i am no expert but will pass along my experience. I have seen something like u and contribute it to fish stress during certain times of the year. Hot water temp that we have just come out of is when i see things like that. I am also located just outside of Marshall so we most likely have the same water temps.

If you rake the coontail out, and the wind doesn't blow more back in, then raking once or twice a year will be sufficient.

Is this going to be run on dry land, or under water?

If under water, just use the weighted airline going to each diffuser assembly, any water in the line will not be a problem and neither will be the dip. If on land, then the dip will cause problems with water condensing and collecting in the dip. You'd have to run some type of anti-freeze system in the winter to prevent the line from freezing, unless you can bury it all below the frost line.

We have done single runs of over 800 feet to a 5 diffuser airstation, all under water using BottomLine weighted airline from Vertex. We have also run black poly line over 2,000 feet under ground from the compressor to the pond without any issues.

Recently got 5 inches of rain. But it came slowly. That's what I call a farmers rain and did dang little for my water holes. I have 2 actual ponds with fish and 3 small leaky holes in the ground, no fish, for the pigs to roll around in.

Lots of dozer companies out there but very few know how to even dig a pond much less repair/reconstruct it. To do it right, the new loam, not just clay, will have to be knitted in with the old soils. Otherwise you will wind up with a leaky seam.

This is way above my pay grade since I have no experience with high water tables. It would have to be done with a Track hoe/backhoe. Dozers can't operate in water or deep mud. And, the water table will mean that the bucket will be filling with mud instead of soil. It may be possible but not sure it would be, to me, cost justifiable.

Welllllll, kind of. Kind of not.

I had a couple low spots out in the terrace that comes out of that field that was holding water making farming through them not so nice. So to make sure they drained I took some dirt out of the bottom of the channel all the way to the pond.

The field terrace drains now but I kind of exchanged the low spots in the field for a low spot leading into the pond. So when the pond is at full pool (probably 4" down now) there will be water in that area.

So originally when I was setting the overflow pipe to match the full pool level I wanted for the pond, no that area was not designed to have water in it. But to correct a couple low spots in the field at a later date, yes it was.

I put the full pool level as high as I could get it for maximum pond depth and still stay about 30' from the edge of the field. A pretty tight tolerance.

As it turns out it is a really good refuge for fingerling fish. See loads of gams out there, SMB fry and the RES. I kind of like it for that reason (birds like killdeer and other predators like it too). So I could continue to use the area as a road for my UTV I dug out about 6" deep where you see the crushed rock and put back in large rock then topped with smaller rock. I drive right through the 4-6" deep water now.

Tonight I finally did trap a single SMB fingerling about 2" long. Along with ever smaller RES.

If true, they should respond well to fishing after you stop feeding for 2-3 days.

Link to a picture of the pond/land I'm looking to purchase.

What kind of water test kit, if any, should I bring with me next weekend when I go visit it? If the source of the spring is not obvious is there a way to find it?

How far back should I cut those trees, which types of trees are hazardous to ponds (tannins etc).

There is a well tapped to a spring, which I assume is the same one, how can I determine if they are the same spring or not? How bad is that?

Can anyone interpret the soild data i posted fromthe ounty assessor?

https://imgur.com/a/h0Pirew

My 0.15 acre pond was dug out of good clay in a flat spot, with the water level sitting about 2.5 feet below the existing grade.

My freeboard is just bare clay at a 2:1 slope, with nothing growing on it. I would have made the sides a bit less steep, and I would have immediately put down erosion mats to get grass growing before there was wave action to wash the topsoil away. I might have also put a bit of a shelf just above the water line, so that I can have topsoil right down to the water line, and then just straight clay below the waterline.

I also built a beach. It has been great, but is a little squishy underfoot in the water. I would have put down a layer of gravel first , almost like a shallow gravel parking lot, and then put the sand on top of this. I think this would make the beach feel more appealing to the average person.

Finally I wish I had some sort of “skimmer” to pull leaves and algae into one corner of the pond where I could easily remove it. Right now I wait for some wind and go around and manually remove floating organics with a rake. I wish I had a pump or something to pull all this organic material into a corner, where it could be easily removed. Almost like a pool skimmer.

Wife freezes fish all the time and have no problem with storage in the freezer but she does do some special preperation.

First she soaks the fillets with a little bit of milk in the bag over night. Then she spreads the fillets out on cookie sheets and places them in the open in the freezer. Once the fillets are frozen, usually a day later, she will vacuum seal them in freezer bags. Done that way never had any come out bad up to a year later.

There sure are differences in canning fish. Normally cooked fish we like CC about as well as BG. Have not eaten that much bass yet but looks like next year we will need to start harvesting some. In the last year wife has been pressure canning the skirts off of the BG fillets (actually most of them are BG/GSF hybrids). She keeps what I would call the tenderloin fillet strip for regular cooking or freezing and the skirt that has the pin bones she freezes till she has enough to run a batch in the pressure canner. The pressure canned BG is great and we mix it with sardines usually when we eat it but eaten alone is about like very mild tuna when made into BG salad like tuna salad. But she tried canning some CC and it turned out mush. Glad she just tried a little bit of the CC because it was horrible. We did not even eat the rest of the jar. Was really surprised how much differently the two held up to canning.

So far to date we have harvested and filleted just over 400 BG (mostly hybrids) and 75 CC. I'm guessing around 250# of BG removed and 90# of CC removed from the 3 acre main pond and my 1 acre old refurbished pond combined.

Yep, without either/or sunshine or wind(wave) action, water isn't oxygenated. That's why it is best when filling or adding water to a pond from a well, it needs to be run over rocks to break it up.

RC, I'm loving this. I seem to recall that about a year or so ago you were ready to drag your pond out in the road and chunk rocks at it due to predation and expense.

At the moment large GSH are competing with the similar sized RES and SMB, that 13" SMB from tonight is an anomoly and likely one of few survivors of my May 2019 fish kill, I know I had at least two survivors that were 7" to 8" at this time last year. The vast majority of the SMB are currently 8" to10" and are struggling with the competition for groceries with large GSH. The large GSH that I have been pulling out were 2" to 5" last year when I stocked 4" to 6" SMB after the fish kill. The fish kill was caused by chemical drift from the neighboring farm field, an application of 2,4-D, Atrizine, and fertilizer killed my algea bloom and caused an severe DO sag. Best estimate is that it killed 98% of the SMB in the pond before I restocked.

Another question to ask them is that IF you are successful, and they acclimate to your pond, will you be able to renovate the pond in 5/10 years if you wanted to, or would the protected/endangered species trump your wish to renovate the pond?

Liquidsquid
I wonder if when the pond is at it's fullest and just starting to drop so you know things are flowing out, then treat it again with soilfloc. I would think if you could get it to seal up enough to keep it higher than the trouble area that the pressure would keep the flow going out instead of in.
Also maybe it would be worth trying to pump a little more water out while it's at the level that it holds steady, to see if it comes back up on it's own or not, so you'll know for sure if it flows both ways. Maybe you're just getting below the troubled areas?

This is exactly the kind of info I was looking for--thank you! I'm sure more questions will come up, though, so please keep an eye out for me!

I started lilies this year too. I planted tubers in dish tubs about 4 inches deep in soil with sand and small rocks on top to keep tubers in place. I started them in water 4 inches above tub top. As they grew I pushed deeper into water they are now at 24 inches of water. I will leave them at that depth or a little deeper for the winter freeze then plan to pull shallow next spring and hopefully start cycle over again. I also placed fertilizer in pot while planting.