Hey All- I have crawled this site for years- thanks for all of the domain knowledge! I finally got out of the city (Dallas, Tx) into the country. I have 1.2 acres and want to put a small, 1/8 acre pond at the lowest point, hoping for a max depth of 11ish feet. I have 3 or 4 acres of drainage in my watershed. I got a little Bx23s with a backhoe and dug down about 4 feet. I have 2.5-3' of very hard black clay, then it turns to a sand stone mess that looks like it will dump water. The top layer of my property is severely cracked when dry leading me to believe it has a high clay content. It was tough digging and the clay balls are so dense I could barely break them with a shovel.
I had a couple of guys out last week to quote my little pond, they all "think it will work". A couple of questions, and i apologize for the long intial post...-
-Assuming that under the clay layer it's all that sand stone junk, does this seem feasible by redistribution the clay from the dig? If not, could I have the guy pull the top layer off other areas of the property and achieve a natural bottom pond?
-Do I have enough watershed to keep the pond reasonably full assuming a decent rain year? Stats I have found suggest 5 acres to 1 acre of pond... seems low to me in my region?
I know this is a tiny pond... I HOPE to start this year with fat head minnow, then move in some BG if it fills up this fall. If possible, I'd like to add some LMB to it next year if all else proves fruitful. I'd like the fish to be able to reproduce and sustain a population. I'm not worried about size of the fish and do plan on harvesting both BG and LMB each year. Id, rather not go with pellet feeding, or non reproducing hybrids if i can avoid it. I would also be willing to restock FHM pretty regularly. I know from past threads that to even consider this I would need to fertilize it and heavily oxygenate it. I'm flexible on stocking and annual harvest volumes.
When I was young, we had a smaller pond that was completely unmanaged on family land in the mountains of VA. Every year we caught and harvested BG and LMB out it. I know this is probably the exception rather than a rule but that's what I'm hoping to recreate, in a sense. A couple of questions on this point-
--what would you think about stocking ratios?
- if too ambitious, what would you reccomend stocking?
- any pro tips I may be missing?
- attaching a "to scale" design on my survey for reference. Is this a silly shape for this size pond? The trees are existing and was hoping to keep the large one. I think the roots might make that idea a non starter... it's a hackberry.
Any advice anyone has for me would be welcome, thanks in advance for everything!
Welcome to the Forum. A small pond with 3 or 4 acres of drainage should work. Feed a good quality feed to the bluegills. Let them get a head start on the bass before stocking the predators. Stock bluegills and fathead minnows. Let them get a head start before stocking bass. Stock bass when they can go to sleep with their mouth open and wake up with a full belly.
Assuming a decent rain year can end once you dig that hole.
Best of luck and don’t lie to your wife about the costs. I tried that and it never works.
It's not about the fish. It's about the pond. Take care of the pond and the fish will be fine. PB subscriber since before it was in color.
Without a sense of urgency, Nothing ever gets done.
Boy, if I say "sic em", you'd better look for something to bite. Sam Shelley Rancher and Farmer Muleshoe Texas 1892-1985 RIP
The handbook for watershed in the area west of Ft. Worth is in the range of 12 to 20 watershed acres per acre of pond. If you have 3 acres for a 1/8th acre pond, that gives you a ratio of 24:1, so you should have enough water, not counting the "exceptional drought" years.
Are you building a house on the property? Water well or city water? For a pond that small, you could probably supplement the pond during a bad drought with water from your house to get the fish through to the next rain.
I can't quite tell from your description about how you are planning to construct the pond. Can you look around your property on the satellite view and see if you can find some 0.5 acre to 5 acre ponds in your area? That is a good approximation of the feasibility of pond building in your vicinity.
How hard was your "sandstone mess"? Could you break out chunks with your little backhoe bucket, or did it just make your bucket teeth squeal when you tried to scratch it? If the sandstone was friable (crumbly), your contractors could probably get through that sandstone layer for a deeper pond if your subsoil goes back to clay beneath a few feet of sandstone. (A medium-sized excavator has much more break-out force than your backhoe.)
Did your test hole start to fill with some water after you got down to the sandstone? How much slope is on your property? How rolling is the terrain in your county? Usually, areas called "Springtown" have some natural springs. Your sandstone layer sounds like a good candidate for creating local springs. If you did get water in your test hole then a "groundwater" pond might be an option for you.
If that sandstone was dry or impermeable, then that is not an option for you, and you will need to build the more typical "sealed" pond.
If you do have a lot of slope down to that corner of your property, then your idea for scraping up clay and building a "U"-shaped berm around the downslope side of the pond should be feasible. However, you really do need some slope to make it work. If you can only dig down 3' until hitting sandstone, then your pond bottom will only be 2' below the existing ground elevation. (You will need to excavate down to the sandstone, and then compact a 1' clay blanket on top of that for your bottom seal.)
If you are going for a 10' deep pond, then your berm will need to be 8' above the existing ground level. If you can envision a rough topographic map in your head when standing at the pond site, then everything inside that 8' high contour line will be "pond".
Also, you cannot build your pond shoreline right at the edge of the your property line. An 8' tall clay berm will probably need a 1:3 slope to be stable. That means the CLOSEST your shoreline can be is 24' from your boundary. (It will actually me more than that, since the flat part at the top of your berm needs to be a few feet wide.)
I hope that gives you some more ideas as to the best way to approach your pond construction project. I had to make many assumptions, which means that several are certainly wrong. If you clarify some more after analyzing what I said, you can probably get some better advice on the forum.
I'd go BG and FHM at the same time. Sure the BG will pick some of them off as they grow, but if you aren't planning to use pellet feeding you will want some food for the BG's in there. Without the use of supplemental feeding the pond will likely produce smaller numbers of fish in both BG and LMB. One of the other guys might have better numbers but lets try to work it two ways.
First if a standard 1 acre pond stocking is 50-100 LMB per acre then a 1/8 acre pond would be stocking 6-12 LMB. Forage stocking density of 10:1 at a minimum would 60-120 BG. I wonder if you could do something like 70 BG and 20ish RES along with a couple of pounds of FHM as an initial stocking.
Working those numbers backwards 90 BG/RES would put you at 9LMB on a 10:1.
If you stocked say 6LMB they would have an over abundance of food and would grow quicker/heavier. If you stocked 12 LMB they may do well in the beginning but overall as the pond matured they would likely be leaner. I have been amazed at the early growth of LMB. Caught a few LMB out of our new pond this year to check on some lengths and weights. JPS ran a little data on it and my 2" stocked grew to 8.1" LMB that weighted .36 lbs had consumed nearly .5 lbs from May 31 - Aug 24. Think of the number of little minnows, and bugs that guy had to eat and then multiply that times the number of fish in the pond.
The use of food and a feeder will greatly improve the BG size and population and likely indirectly help your LMB as well. As to harvesting, once the fish start to spawn they will fill out the rest of the water. Your initial numbers are just to get them started. For the FHM restocking, you absolutely can do it, but think of what the gain is to the LMB. They will eat 10lbs of forage to gain 1lb. Those will be some expensive and short lived snacks in the pond. Say $15/lb on FHM vs a bag of quality food at $60-70 for 40-50lbs. Much bigger bang for your buck on a bag of quality food that you could hand throw and get to see your fish come up to eat.
Welcome to Pond Boss and good luck on your new pond build!
1.5acre LMB, YP, BG, RES, GSH, Seasonal Tilapia I subscribe to Pond Boss Magazine
Including a larger shot of the property to better explain the layout and what I have put together so far. I have house and the grey block is my workshop. We are on city water and I would supplement the pond if it got too low or too hot.
Great call on google maps, there are several decent sized ponds in the immediate area which is a good indicator.
The sandstone junk had the consistency of crushed concrete. The backhoe got through it surprisingly well. I didn’t get deep enough to get passed it, but the little hole did not retain water in last nights storm. That layer is basically a drain.
To the crease (green dotted line) from the high end of the back side of my property (top right corner) I have about 4 feet. The back of my house is about 6 feet higher than the lowest point. Unfortunately, there are no springs on the property.
I do plan on building the u-shaped dam you referenced. Great call out on the distance/depth… Im 25 feet off my property line and 10 foot of the fence I had put in (red line is prop boundary, purple is the fence). I think the contractor should be able to get through that sandstone layer, but who knows what lies beneath. Might have to push the fence back. The 1 foot of clay lining is a helpful reference point as well. I appreciate the response!
Thanks for the advice Boondoggle- I will do the BG/RES combo, that was something I had been thinking about. Also, it feels like a lot more fun to do it all at once, when the water level permits.
The stocking ratio you advised makes a lot of sense. Some great data points on the feed/cost/productivity ratios also. I’ll plan on getting a bag of food.
However, IMO the time to discover your "surprises" is prior to the construction phase. I would highly recommend getting 3-4 samples from your pond site before building. Also, if you have that in hand, your builder will be much more able to give you a bid without a huge range of contingency costs.
One option is to get some drill core samples of your subsoils. Frequently, your county NRCS office can arrange to have a little drilling rig come out and get those samples. (I don't know if you are in the city limits and if that changes the county rules?) Regardless, I would call your NRCS office and see what help they can provide for building a pond.
Even if they don't do that service in your area, it is possible to get it done by a private contractor. However, they will be difficult to find. If you search "soil sampling" you will get a million hits for the service of testing topsoils - which is not what you want.
Another option would be to pay a little "hourly rate" to the contractor you like most to dig a few slot trenches. A large mini-excavator, like a John Deere 60, could get down just over 12 feet. Or use the contractor's smallest "real" excavator to get a bit deeper. He could dig 3-4 sample holes in two hours on your property and get through the sandstone layer to determine how thick it is AND what lies beneath it. You would also have to pay his transportation fee (which goes up rapidly on the larger equipment).
It would be priceless though, to know if the sandstone layer is 20' thick. Or if under that sandstone layer you hit a solid ledge of limestone. Hopefully you will find that you have 2' of sandstone and then go back into good clay-bearing material.
You said the "sandstone junk" had the consistency of crushed concrete. Do you know what "caliche" is? Obviously, I don't have eyeballs on your site, but that might be caliche. If so, it should also function as a "drain", the same as a porous sandstone.
Another thing to consider is your spoils (the excavated material). You can do some landscaping berms (that do not have to seal water) on your property that you core with the unwanted spoils and then put a cover of 6-12" of good topsoil back over. If not, then your pond bid will also have to include hauling and dumping some of your spoils, which will significantly add to your costs.
If your junk rock is caliche, you might be able to use that as rip rap around part of the pond. It is calcium carbonate cemented soil, so it would provide the same water chemistry benefit as limestone rip rap. Do you like the "look" of what you were digging? Crushing it up a little under bulldozer treads will not be as uniform as the material commonly sold as rip rap, but the small fish might like the mixed sizes even better.
Finally, have you talked to any pond contractors that install pond liners? For a 1/8th acre pond, a liner would probably cost about the same as the equipment hours to make your clay seals around the pond. The liner would give you MUCH greater confidence against leaks! (And it might actually be cheaper.)
With a liner, your junk rock layer might even be beneficial. You could slope your edges to a shelf in the rock layer, and then go down at a steep angle to your total pond depth. Your pond would be shaped like a margarita glass. The contractor would then put some soil material over the shallow part of the liner (to grow some plants) but the deepest part of the pond could be bare liner.
Just throwing out more ideas, but you might want to read up on pond liners and see if that might be a good option in your situation where you have a known drain.
If the volume of clay soil is enough to line the pond bottom with 18" thick layer, then you should be OK. If not, then go the liner route.
You don't want to feed pellets but it's OK to stock FHM annually. Considering both are "food" the cost per pound of fish flesh grown per pound of "food" is much better to swallow when considering fish food pellets vs. FHM. Now, should I be saying this as a person that sells FHM for pond stocking? Probably not. FHM feed fish up to around 8" in length. It takes about 10# of FHM to grow one pound of fish flesh. It takes at the most 2# of good quality fish food to grow 1# of fish flesh. $60 of Optimal Bluegill food will grow give or take 30# of fish flesh. How much would 300# of FHM cost you? Not to mention the possibility of introducing an unwanted fish species if the supplier used wild caught FHM..... Just saying it's not wrong to want to feed FHM, it's just not the most logical thing to do when it comes to a budgetary standpoint.
I dug my little hole deeper and then called a local contractor that did others ponds. He looked at my dirt pile/hole and was familiar with the composition from the others he has done locally. He assured me that the layer I was worried about was very clay rich and gave me a screaming deal on digging the pond and forestry mulching my back acre.
He brought his equipment out, then it rained cats and dogs for 3 days (was wishing I had my hole dug!). I have been agonizing over whether or not it would hold water. We got a quick shot of rain and I went out this morning and there was a tiny bit of water in the bottom! Not conclusive, but I thought is was a good indicator.
We used the spoils to regrade my back yard and included some shallow swales along natural drainage lines to encourage the water to go to the pond.
October is a good rain month here. I have been considering getting a ton of bentonite to fortify everything but haven't decided if the insane shipping charges are worth the piece of mind.
Try to start seeding in your vegetation cover ASAP on all of the clay/top soil that is currently bare in the drainage area to your pond.
You can even start land plants in the first couple of feet of your pond slopes to hold that material in place. It might be a while until your pond reaches full pool, and those plants will die will they do finally go under water.
