got rid of pond...

[Greenthumb18]

Today i had to get rid of my 150 to 200 gallon pond out , i was very sad about this but to look on the bright side i'll have more room to plant. I still want a pond so i might make an above ground one maybe, to see how that works. I'm thinking about using that 5' by 5' of garden space for strawberries and some flowers.

 

[setter4]

Today i had to get rid of my 150 to 200 gallon pond out , i was very sad about this but to look on the bright side i'll have more room to plant. I still want a pond so i might make an above ground one maybe, to see how that works. I'm thinking about using that 5' by 5' of garden space for strawberries and some flowers.

We used to have a pond in the yard but we couldn't keep the dogs out of it. One day I had a dog all groomed to go to a show that week end and DH opened the gate and ....SPLASH!...yucky green dog! lol
That's when the pond left.
We just took our 24" above ground pool out and turned that into garden.
Gardens seem to take over!

 

[Greenthumb18]

I bet you were tried of having to constantly clean the dogs.Water gardening is a type of garden thats a little different from other gardening.
I just really like having nice koi and goldfish but last summer a few raccoons got in my pond and cleaned me out, maybe with raised ponds it isnt as easy for the coons to enter.

 

[patandchickens]

I bet you were tried of having to constantly clean the dogs.

OTOH maybe you've invented a new kind of pond cleaning! You could start a service, rent out a bunch of absorbant longhaired dogs to sponge all the green slime and duckweed out of peoples ponds! Right?

LOL

Pat

 

[vfem]

I geez... I can just image! We have a 2 acre pond that covers some of the property and my dog is FOREVER jumping in for a swim. She'll chase the ducks around and around. Then I'm stuck giving her a bath when she finally dries out enough to bring her in. So stinky.

 

[setter4]

I bet you were tried of having to constantly clean the dogs.

OTOH maybe you've invented a new kind of pond cleaning! You could start a service, rent out a bunch of absorbant longhaired dogs to sponge all the green slime and duckweed out of peoples ponds! Right?

LOL

Pat

Ley me tell you...English Setters work really well for doing that!

 

[Rosalind]

I am going to pick you guys' brains about ponds, now that you've admitted to having one.

Tell me if this plan seems at all reasonable, or if I need to adjust it somewhat.

I have an old bank barn with a looooong sloping roof, about, hmm, 35 x 40 feet. It has architectural shingles on it, the kind that don't really have too much runoff contamination. I would like to attach a raingutter to the back of the barn to catch all the rain that comes off, and direct this rainwater into a fairly deep cistern. My plan is to build a rock thingy per the instructions given by Scott & Helen Nearing (build wood forms at a certain rise/run angle, dump in rocks + mortar, remove forms, make a nice surface using prettier rocks and mortar). Then I'm going to put a pond liner in there, that'll be my cistern. To control the mosquito/mayfly/waterboatman population that occurs in all still water around here, I'm going to put in trout, bluegills, the local freshwater pond-type fish, also crayfish and freshwater shrimps. Barn + cistern are both built into a northern slope. Garden and the rest of the property are all downhill from barn + cistern. Total vertical drop from barn to boulders is probably, hmm, 10-12 feet.

Then I'm going to dig a trench from the cistern to the boulders at the other end of the grassy yard. Fill trench with packed clay (soil is all clay around here) and yet another liner, then put rocks/pebbles in. In this trench will be planted reeds, comfrey, cattails, cress. Trench will be fed periodically by means of siphoning from the cistern when needed. The trench creek will feed into a koi pond dug around the boulders. I can maybe make a sort of waterfall type thing using the boulders, too, to aerate the water. The idea is that the whole thing will be rainwater fed and gravity-driven--to recirculate water, all I have to do is start the siphon, which is easy. I can even put a little waterwheel by the siphon to collect some of the power for...I dunno, something...and it's easy enough to drop a diaphragm pump into the creek for irrigating the garden as needed.

So I guess my question is, why did you get rid of your pond? Was it a lot of maintenance? What all did you have to do for it? What would you do differently? What would you warn me about?

 

[setter4]

I didn't see any plan for aeiration of the pond which I think you will need and also I think trout will require more water movement than you are suppying...JMO

 

[patandchickens]

My plan is to build a rock thingy per the instructions given by Scott & Helen Nearing (build wood forms at a certain rise/run angle, dump in rocks + mortar, remove forms, make a nice surface using prettier rocks and mortar). Then I'm going to put a pond liner in there, that'll be my cistern.

You'll want to make *real* sure the walls are thick/braced enough to stand the horizontal force of the weight of the water.

To control the mosquito/mayfly/waterboatman population that occurs in all still water around here, I'm going to put in trout, bluegills, the local freshwater pond-type fish, also crayfish and freshwater shrimps.

Have you looked at the numbers for this. Trout, especially if you mean larger rather than 'eensy fingerling and then they die before getting bigger' type trout, need pretty cold water, which in most places requires DEEP water or a constant spring-fed creek. Centrarchids (bass, crappie, sunfish) are much more tolerant of warm water but even they may have trouble in a pond that's just a few feet deep and partly aboveground, especially if it's in the sun.

Also the fish will eat the freshwater shrimps (dunno if you mean REAL shrimps or amphipods, but, either way) and whatever the fish don't eat, chances are the crayfish will. If things are crowded and food is short, the crayfish and fish will also go after each other to some extent (unless you use small baby crayfish - then the fish will just eat the crayfish).

Finally, think about stocking densities - I do not know what volume pond you're contemplating but it's unlikely to have room for all *that* much fish biomass.

Then I'm going to dig a trench from the cistern to the boulders at the other end of the grassy yard. Fill trench with packed clay (soil is all clay around here) and yet another liner, then put rocks/pebbles in. In this trench will be planted reeds, comfrey, cattails, cress. Trench will be fed periodically by means of siphoning from the cistern when needed.

This part sounds reasonable as long as you tap off water frequently enough to keep the trench plants happy (because they will be growing on top of a liner, their *only* source of root moisture will be the water you add from the cistern, and even if there are a couple feet of soil over the liner that's still a pretty finite supply)

The trench creek will feed into a koi pond dug around the boulders. I can maybe make a sort of waterfall type thing using the boulders, too, to aerate the water. The idea is that the whole thing will be rainwater fed and gravity-driven--to recirculate water, all I have to do is start the siphon, which is easy.

Sorry, I am totally not understanding this part. How is it 'recirculating' -- what I am seeing is the rainwater-fed cistern is tapped into the trench, which runs into the koi pond and then that's it. You would need a pump to return koi pond water to the cistern to make it actually recirculate.

Recirculating or not, I fear that there are several serious problems with this part of the idea. First, you are going ot have to tap off a LOT of cistern water, pretty frequently/continually, to offset the very large amount of evaporation that the reed trench and koi pond will experience. (Reed trench especially). I can't see your rainfall posssibly providing that much!

Second, you wouldn't *want* a recirculating system I don't think, anyhow, because the water will be quite warm by the time it was pumped from koi pond back to cistern (too warm for trout) and also if you were recirculating it the proper order of operations would be cistern -> koi -> trench (using the trench plants to scrub out the excess nutreints from the koi part of the system before returning water to the cistern which needs to stay fairly low-nutrient).

Finally, I don't think that the waterfall for aerating water coming into the koi pond is necessary or desirable -- there will be very little water coming into the koi pond anyhow, unless you do have a big pump running the whole thing to recirculate (but as I say, bad idea) and with just a trickle, bouncing it off rocks will not aerate so much as *evaporate* your already-too-limited water. I would strongly suggest that, in this type of koi pond, you use an actual powered aerator (be it electric or solar, or even wind-powered although they are not usually useful in tiny ornamental ponds)

Sorry Rosalind, I am not trying to shoot holes in things, it's just that I really really don't see your system working anything like you are envisioning... :/

The big things to be aware of in pond design/mgmt are:

1) you WILL have to fiddle a lot with nutrient balances (so that you do not get overgrown with algae and other undesirables -- this is especially true if you are fertilizing plants in/near the pond or if you have fish being fed in the pond). Nutrient problems manifest as things like green skanky water (bad for fish and invertebrates as well as bad for aesthetics), green 'hair' all through pond, stink problems, pond filling in with nasty sediment, or death of some/all of your desired fish and invertebrates.

2) small and/or shallow and/or aboveground ponds get pretty warm; you can only stock them with things that can deal with those temperatures (and with each other).

3) evaporation is a real issue, especially the more surface area you have (and a planted trickling trench is the *ultimate* in evaporators). Waterfalls (or anything else that causes any splashing) cause substantially more evaporation yet.

If you could summarize what your main goal(s) would be in building a pond system, probably we could make some suggestions -- but unless you are leaving out some major information (like 'oh, and this would be fed by a high-volume cold spring') I hate to say it but your plan is really not going to work, sorry.

Good luck, sorry to be a downer,

Pat, aquatic community ecologist (specializing in critters of small [naturally occurring] ponds) before 'retiring' to mommyhood

 

[Rosalind]

No no, this is good criticism. I can fix things, or design around them, if I know about them ahead of time. Got this idea from the state extension service & a co-worker, so good to know if they are all sorts of wrong (they may well be).

44.9 inches precip/year x roof area = 39,185 gallons/year. Obviously I am not going to store all of this at once, but it's also more than a wee little rain barrel system can accommodate. Let depth of cistern = 8 feet. Let three months' of runoff (the "cool" months before it gets very hot and evaporation becomes An Issue) = ~ 10,000 gallons. That's not counting snowmelt BTW. Then my cistern has to be about 14 feet across. I can make the cistern as deep as 10 feet, but it will have to be 12 feet across at least.

This may seem like quite a lot, but you haven't seen the friggin' quicksand that's behind my barn. The whole back of the barn is rotting off, fresh mortar doesn't cure properly, there's mushrooms that eat small children back there. The back of the barn is subsiding a bit. My goal is to catch a goodly portion of the runoff (and it is the runoff--previous owner re-graded so the runoff would at least run *around* instead of *through* the barn) for my own nefarious purposes, put some into frog/turtle/fish habitat, and not contribute to the local mosquito population. Also to look nice as a landscaping feature.

I measured the swimming pool evaporation over the past two years (I realize n=2 is not a good sample, but it's all I've got). Swimming pool is apx. 20x40x8 feet deep. Last year we had zero evaporation--I'm not kidding, it rained all the friggin time, the pool overflowed from rainwater--year before we had about 2100 ft^3 evaporation per my water bills (summer water usage - winter water usage = filling the pool, b/c I never water the garden). That's 15,700 gallons totaled over 6 months, 2.6 gallons/ft^2. For a cistern 12 feet in diameter, that's a net loss of 294 gallons or 3% total volume of a 10,000 gallon cistern. Or 4% loss if I have a 14 foot diam. cistern. So I figured the loss from the cistern itself is trivial, especially if I keep it partly covered (it will be heavily shaded by overhanging mature hickory trees in any case--even brush doesn't grow there, it's a dense canopy). Pool gets more sun than that, but even so does not have an algae problem.

The trench would be, hmm, about 90 feet long and let's say 3 feet wide, in part shade. If constantly watered it would have a summertime loss of 5251 gallons (per worst case, the 2007 drought conditions), a nontrivial amount, true. Do you think it would require constant watering, or would weekly be sufficient to maintain a reed bed? If I can get away with weekly irrigation, then my water loss is cut considerably.

Now, the koi pond: Also heavily shaded, in this case by mature blue spruce on one side and by my orchard trees on the other. In the few bits that have part-shade, there's pawpaws. Another shade so dense that even brushy stuff won't grow--hence why I figured it would be a good pond place. In fact I rather thought my biggest problem would really be keeping leaves out of the things. Around here koi ponds are about 5' deep. This is not a problem.

I am not dead set on any particular species mix. If all I can have is sunfish and crayfish and the odd catfish or two, that's fine. If they eat each other, eh, circle of life. DH wants koi in at least one vessel, though. I was originally going to put a waterwheel driven pump, but if you think that's a bad idea, scratch it. Since this is going to be built into the back slope of a bank, it can be made to have a "shallow end" as well if needed.

There's a couple ways I can aerate & move around the water. I can put in a regular bubbler. I also have a contraption that is currently being a piece of art in the garden, but it has the stuff inside to be an aerator/fountain dealie (one of those decorative kind that's shaped like a water fairy), I can put that anywhere is convenient.