Yes, I think I'll do that RAH.
It should keep water in it. Since this is the first stop for the water from the terrace it will get recharged very quickly with any small amount of runoff from a rain event. Evaporation may make the level drop but I seriously doubt it will ever go completely dry. Maybe low enough and poor water quality that FHM might be the only thing that survives year round. Not to mention the potential of freezing solid in the winter.
My guess is, during a large rain event, minnows and even BG will swim against the current and be in this pond (more like a big puddle actually) anyway. Likely they will have die offs, on and off because of various factors, but I would expect it not to stay devoid of fish for long periods.
I'll throw some FHM in occasionally anyway just for the heck of it. As long as the water is good, like you said, it should provide some minnows for down stream, as they get flushed through during larger rain events. During a big rain event the two culverts flow full flow and water even backs up into the field against the culverts about a quarter acre. So a lot of water will flow through this area once, twice or even more during a typical year.
It will hold water. Solid yellow clay like they make bricks out of at Acme Brick about 5 miles west of us. It sets basically at the peak of a hill, with only the terrace channel being low enough for water to pass over the hill (through the culverts), diverted from the farm field to the east. We needed this terrace to provide adequate watershed for the main pond, so it was built right after the main pond was built.
One problem with making this pond as well as the bigger sediment pond and mini forage pond is that they rob water from my main pond. I have a pretty limited watershed to keep the ponds full to begin with. So all this additional surface acreage (less than .2 total though) is water caught before it enters the main pond. So in a drought, any rain event just enough to have a little run off but not much, fills these small ponds first and keeps it out of the main pond. We will never have a problem with the ponds filling, as we are in a high rainfall area of the state with some occasional very large rainfall events. But we also have some extended very hot, dry periods. So during those times these small ponds may cause the water level in the main pond to go lower than it otherwise would. I built the ponds this spring and we had a really dry year where the main pond got to about 2' low. This included the initial fill of the small ponds robbing water from the main pond, so I hope this last year is as bad as it ever will get.
Things are in good shape now, water wise.
Last edited by snrub; 11/28/14 12:31 PM.
