Before this thread closes with amusing, yet less scientific remarks, a few notes: The soil has a low low clay content, yet does have some clay. There's your silty sand, sandy silt, and sandy silt clay Hartsell soil. The pond builder, uses alot of dozer hours mixing the subsurface layers with the deeper layers and packing it in in 4" lifts. The rock base starts off as soft sandy rock some 7' deep. The neighbors' .5ac pond took years to hold water. My dad says, (old school farmer type ) that natural growth and accumulation sometimes seals porous pond bottoms. You can see the lower .5 ac pond has aquatic growth and is darker. It was $2,050 to excavate (it has been recently enlarged slightly from the picture). The forest in draw just above it is holds a towering hardwood forest stand, has 16" of top soil and is rocky. To have the pond excavated there, I believe the price would of been 5 or 10,000 more and would have wiped out our tallest tree stand on the property. To I.D. the little .2 pond, look left of center, looks as brightly colored sand, yet if you examine the photo, there's 18" of standing water (and 7 bullfrogs). A couple of trees partially hide the south edge of it as well. Can rooted vegetation help seal a pond bottom?
Last edited by SoSauty; 08/03/08 03:14 PM. Reason: clarity
