Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Building a dam My Second Pond: Ground Breaking!

Friday and Saturday were pretty busy. On the dirt-moving side, we put in the drain pipe and spread/finished dressed the remainder of the topsoil.

The drain is double-walled (corrugated outside, smooth inside) 8" black plastic. There are 2 4'x4' rubbersheet-on-wood-frame anti-seep collars on it at the top of the dam, basically one on each side of the core. The whole drain pipe ditch was recompacted with a jumping jack, in roughly 3" lifts at the core/anti-seep collars, in slightly thicker (6"?) lifts on the backside of the dam. We brought up a small dump truck load of clay from the save pile in the woods to have plenty of good material. This is the same way we recompacted the drainpipe on my first pond, and it has shown absolutely NO settling wrt the rest of the dam in 6 years.


At the drain discharge, my excavator put in a "splashpit" consisting of a bowl lined with head-size chunks of limestone to take up the force of the water running out. This is a big improvement over what we did last time (nothing, and I added rock later) and I think it will probably work pretty good at controlling erosion there (there has not been a serious problem on the other pond in 6 years, just a small hole that seems stable in size).


They also distributed and spread out the remainder of the topsoil pile, doing one field at a time so Mrs. Gallus and I could begin reseeding on each one in turn. Two grass seed mixes were selected by my better half, our Equine Nutrition Officer, in consultation with the local S&W guys. They want fescue on the dam as it is more drought-tolerant here, she wants no fescue in hayfields/pastures, as it can be problematic to feed to horses in this area, given our local fungal load. (And we think feeding fish is tricky - catfish don't colic.)

For the dam (and the clay save pile in the woods) we are using:
Atlas Tall Fescue (35%)
Climax Timothy (25%)
Orchardgrass (19%)
Bestfor Tetraploid Ryegrass (19 %) - sounds mutant, eh?

For the renovated hay/pasture fields, leading to the other sides of the pond, we are using:
Icon Orchardgrass (33%)
Treasure Timothy (25%)
Spring Green Festulolium (15%) - no, I did not make that up
Command Orchardgrass (14%)
Geronimo Kentucky Bluegrass (10%)

Given our field history and usage, significant amounts of brome grass and various legumes will be appearing volunteer-like over the next few years.

Right now everything has been seeded once and the run over with a drag (upside-down chain link harrow) to mix the seed in with the top 1/2" of dirt (We could do this working alone). We will reseed everything at least one more time and the mulch the high concern/erosion areas with straw. Pictures of that to follow.

The excavator is pulling out the rest of his equipment to do a pond renovation job at a local arboretum Monday, and will be coming back after that to clean up the brush piles and clear fence row space through the woods behind the field next to the new pond. He will be able to assist placing large rock/root ball structure at that time, so I need to see what sizes of each I can handle by myself with the front end loader, place them, and plan out where the big stuff I'll need help with goes. I will be starting a separate thread (which I will link to here) on placing above-dirt structure in the pond.

Here is how it looked and the dirt work was done:

Looking good Theo.

I just realized (probably the unsuppressable beancounter's urge to add up things) that your top grass mix totals 98% and your bottom grass mix adds up to 97%. What's up with that?????

Engineers don't feel the need for everything to add up to 100%.

If you include the small % of weed seed and inert material, it probably comes to 100%.

Damn bro'...that looks really good. You gotta be happy with those results. The setting amongst the trees really tips the back to nature scale.
Awesome job! Now I want anudder one.

Actually SLEPT IN yesterday before working a half-day. We got about 3/4 of the mulching done - we added more seed to the dam, shore around the pond, and the (topsoil added to) hayfield that drains most directly into the pond, them mulched all of them.

Today we will add seed to everything else. Remaining mulch will go on the 2nd reworked hayfield that drains into the pond; I will re-drag everywhere else we add seed to to roll it into the ground.

For those who haven't ever seen one, here is the mulch chopper/blower we rented from the local Soil & Water (NRCS to you!) office ($60 "per day", which amounts to a 4 day weekend for us ) ready to go and in use.

Any updates for us? I love seeing the pictures everyone posts.

Pond Girl:

See continuation in My Second Pond: Structure

Mrs. Gallus spotted this tonight while we were gleaning the clay talus pile for rocks. It's not a meteorite, but it does look like something that re-entered the Earth's atmosphere (see second reference photo). DIED, how much can you get me for a gen-u-wine alien spaceship? $0.25 of it is yours!

Nice find Theo..... We had 27000 yds of dirt moved and we only found the back end of an alien spaceship..