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24 Mar ’13
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I would love to see pictures of your springs, how you captured yours, your cistern/water storage areas etc...
15 Feb ’12
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only spring we have is when we dug out our pond, we hit a small one that started filling it
now between that, snow melt and rain, the pond stays full
and we have our rain water catchment system off the roof as well
24 Mar ’13
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Love your pond! Still on my to-do list though!
5 Mar ’12
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KVR -- could you go into more depth on how you built your pond? We want to build one and have a lower water table. As such, around this time of year we have a lot of water spread out on our land. We want a pond for the kids to swim in and I think digging one would allow some of the water to drain off of other areas. I think I remember you mentioning you had a high water table too/wet ground so I was wondering how you determined where to build the pond, how big, etc.
15 Feb ’12
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Basically when we had our house berm built, I had the excavating company clear out the back field for us. It was overgrown with saplings and heavy underbrush. I had wanted a pond so since they had the equipment there, I asked them how hard and what it would cost to dig a pond. They said since there was so much clay they probably wouldn't have to haul anything in for it, so it would basically just be a hourly cost to dig the hole. They charged 100 dollars a hour and I believe it took them 12 hours to dig it.
We basically just picked the lowest spot in the yard and dug it there.
They built up the outer edge and just compacted the sides with the bucket after they dug the hole. We had looked at using a pond liner, but the size we would have needed would have cost about 2000 dollars and weighed about 1000 pounds. I wasn't really looking forward to hauling that around.
If I had to do it over, I would have them not build up the edge and just used the original grade, that way when the pond was filled it would have just overflowed and ran over the back edge and we wouldn't have had to install the culvert pipe. We also had some leaking out the side the first couple years, because when they built up the edge they basically took the clay out of the hole and built it up on the lawn and there was a seam between the original grade and the berm that water was leaking through. It has since sealed itself.
We are going to stock it with rainbow trout this spring, it will be another food source for us.
5 Mar ’12
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Thanks KVR, and sorry to hijack the thread. The last question I have is how deep is your pond?
We have all sandy soil here so I think I would either need a pond liner (I hear old vinyl billboard signs work awesome) or be ok with the pond level changing as the water level in the ground changes. We have a high water table so I don't think that would be terrible.
Our whole meadow flooded yesterday when our creek flooded. Water is everywhere and I think with a pond, some grading/fill, and some luck I can channel most of the water from the creek into the pond.
24 Mar ’13
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We have water at 3ft below ground level here, at least in the areas where we have dug so far. We hit a spring when we dug the footers for the granny flat behind the house. It filled the entire footer in less than 5 minutes! That wasn't fun... I'm trying to get hubby to rent a backhoe to scoop out an area that is already swampy and use it to fill the raised beds. That would kill two birds with one stone.
15 Feb ’12
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the deepest end is about 12 feet, we basically parked the excavator on the side and just dug as far as we could reach, if your soil is sandy, check and see if there is a local source of bentonite clay, it is used to pack the sides of ponds with to seal them, but then you would have to have water hauled in pretty quick, I don't believe it is suppose to dry out due to cracking
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