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Build Your Own Pond
Do it right, and you'll have a bit of heaven that few other investments can match. Here's how. by John Weiss American Forests:December 1985 A number of years ago on a chilly September morning, I bounded from bed with unusual enthusiasm. In moments I was into my boots and armed with a light spinning rod. I unlatched the back screen door of our southern Ohio farmhouse and hiked a short distance to a little lake surrounded by goldenrod stalks and sparkling shards of early morning frost. It may have been that my fingers were already slightly numb, but more likely it was nervous anticipation that caused my first cast to snag a shoreline bush. The second cast was right on target and as the wobbling plug began swimming away from the cover, a feisty three-pound largemouth clobbered it. The fish jumped and my line suddenly went limp. I'd just hooked --and lost--the first bass I'd ever fished for in that pond. Aside from satisfying the needs of a fanatic angler, the benefits of owning a pond far outweigh the cost and temporary inconveniences associated with any construction project. To name just one, building a pond is an excellent way to enhance the value of a marginal area on your land that may not be well-suited to forestry or agriculture. But also, a pond can be a premier selling attraction. A pond may serve other useful purposes such as meeting critical water needs during a drought, irrigating the garden or orchard, watering livestock, or even fire fighting. There are intangible benefits such as enjoying wildlife drawn to small bodies of water. You don't have to own a large tract of land to consider building a pond. Of the 15 million ponds already in existence in America, the average size is only 1/2 acre. It may not sound like much, but our own 1/2-acre pond is approximately 75 feet wide by 200 feet long, and with an average depth of eight feet it contains more than a million gallons of water! The particular pond size you decide on however, probably won't be dictated by how much money you can afford to spend. Rather, it will hinge almost entirely upon the lay of the land, the composition of the soil and underlying strata, and the general suitability of the terrain for impounding water. These factors dictate what type of earth-moving equipment will be required to build the pond and the number of hours needed. As a result of varying terrain conditions, it's possible one landowner may have to spend only $3,000 to build a five-acre lake while his neighbor has to cough up $6,000 for only a 1/1-acre pond. Since the construction of even a small pond can be expensive, legions of landowners have attempted every imaginable shortcut to reduce costs and, predictably, horror stories abound. In northern Ohio, for example, a landowner came up with a not-too-bright answer to shelling out for an engineer to draw up blueprints and a contractor to do the 'dozer work. He simply designed his own dam, borrowed a friend's D-6 Caterpillar, and pushed the dirt into place. The resulting six-acre lake was a beauty for several years. Then one spring, excessive rainfall raised the pond level. The spillway couldn't handle the additional water and the makeshift dam collapsed, sending a torrent of water cascading down a narrow valley. The flood drowned 20 dairy cows on a neighboring farm, and ruined a barn on another. Today, five years later, lawsuits are still pending against the pond-builder. In another case, this time in Kentucky, a landowner did not follow the advice of a soil analyst who had warned that the compaction of red clay in the pond basin would block water seepage. The landowner saved $2,000 but he now has a "dry" pond. When it rains the pond fills up, but several days after the rain subsides the water begins percolating down through the soil as if it were a sieve, until nothing remains but a hole in the ground. So, the strongest advice I can give anyone contemplating building a pond is to forget about the one-time expense and foster a determination to do the job right. Such an approach will undoubtedly prove the least expensive. And it will result in a pond that is aesthetically pleasing, safe, sound, and in full compliance with the laws that govern the impounding of large quantities of water on private property. That last aspect is critically important to any pond-owner. If a professional engineer designed the pond and it received approval from one or more government agency, it's just like having insurance. What I mean is, if something should go wrong in the future and there is damage to life, limb, or property, it's not likely you will be held liable. One way to build a pond on your property is to hire a private engineering firm that specializes in pond construction. They'll handle everything from initial site examination to surveying, preparation of blueprints, and supervision of numerous subcontractors. However, you should know in advance that this is the most expensive route to take. The second option, and the one I recommend, is to contact your local Soil Conservation Service (SCS) office. This is a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and every state has numerous regional and county offices. Of the many responsibilities charged to SCS offices, one is supervising the technical aspects of private pond construction. The SCS will not pay for any of the construction costs, nor will it do any of the actual work. It will handle all of the professional planning you'd otherwise pay a stiff fee to have a private engineering firm do. This includes site examination, soil analysis, surveying, blueprints, pond and dam specifications, and specifying materials. With blueprints and specs in hand, you can then contact a local contractor to begin work. Don't worry if you don't know how to read blueprints, interpret materials specifications, or anything pertaining to soil chemistry and pond construction. Your contractor will know these things, and your SCS official will be on location virtually every day to oversee operations. Ponds can be almost any shape, but most are rectangular, round, oval, triangular, or teardrop-shaped. In flatlands, a large depression is sometimes scooped out to form the pond basin, and the dam--if there is one--surrounds the pond. More commonly, an earthen dam is placed between steep hillsides and the water backs up and inundates a ravine or valley. As to where the water comes from, the most common sources are surface springs, underground aquifers, streams, surface run-off from higher ground, or a combination of these. A contractor's initial work is to scalp the pond site of its six or eight inches of valuable topsoil and pile it somewhere for later use. Then, with stake flags outlining the high-water mark of the pond-to-be and the centerline of the future dam, dozers begin grading the pond basin to remove all "refusal" (rock, shale, coal blossom, and unwanted soil types) until sufficient pond depth is achieved. A critical aspect of any pond's construction is sealing the basin to prevent water from escaping and building the dam so that no water leaks through. This involves dozers pushing thousands of tons of clay into the pond basin from a nearby "borrow" area, determined from previous soil test samples. If clay is absent in your region, your contractor may have to haul truckloads of bentonite to the site at considerable expense. (Bentonite is a volcanic material that is disked into the soil of the pond basin; when wet, it swells to several times its original volume and creates a water-tight seal.) The dam is created by dozers carving out a T-shaped trench 10 feet deeper than the deepest part of the pond basin. Layer upon layer of clay or bentonite is then pushed into place six inches at a time and compacted with a sheepsfoot roller. When the dam is two-thirds complete, the spillway system is installed. It's simply a length of steel pipe running through the dam structure that allows excess water to escape. Without it, the water level would continue to rise until it began rushing over the top of the dam, which would cause serious erosion. Next is the installation of a toe drain, a length of perforated plastic pipe that runs through the back side of the dam to collect moisture and drain it away. Keep in mind that the front of the dam, against the pond water, is always wet. The toe drain ensures that, should water somehow begin seeping through the compacted clay, it would not saturate all the way to the back and undermine the dam's strength. Finally, an emergency spillway must be built. This is a narrow channel shooting off one side of the pond that takes over if the steel spillway becomes clogged or if excessive rainfall is more than it alone can handle. When the lake basin and dam are completed, the contractor retrieves the tons of topsoil that were set aside and carefully grades it over the dam, around the shorelines, and over the borrow area. Following this, all bare ground is limed, fertilized, seeded, and mulched to get the dam and shorelines vegetated as soon as possible to prevent erosion. All that is left to do now is to wait patiently for the pond to fill with water, which takes from two months to a year depending upon the size of the pond, the amount of rainfall, and the productivity of feeder streams or springs serving the pond. At this time your SCS office will bow out of the picture. They'll recommend that you contact your state department of natural resources for advice on stocking the pond with fish and for a free booklet describing proper pond management techniques. Stocking your pond is accomplished in two ways. If legal in your state, you can catch fish at local lakes and transport them home in a makeshift tank (I used an old camping cooler fitted with an aerator). Or you can buy fish from a hatchery; your department of natural resources will supply names of local vendors. The most compatible species are largemouth bass, channel catfish, bluegills, and redear sunfish. The most widely accepted ratio is 100 bass to 500 panfish per surface acre of water. At all costs, do not introduce white or black crappies, rock bass, bullheads, or the largest predator gamefish (northern pike or muskies, for example) into your pond. They will present serious problems in time. Your fish must have something to eat, so an ecologically sound food chain should be established. Pond-management handbooks suggest applying fertilizer to the water, which gives birth to algae bloom and plankton. These microscopic food items serve as forage for the tiniest insects, crustaceans, and minnows, which in turn become prey to bass, and panfish fry, and fingerlings, which then feed larger panfish and bass. If you want your fish to achieve the most rapid growth rates possible, you can supplement their natural forage by stocking either golden shiners or fathead minnows that are one to four inches long. The recommended amount is 400 minnows per surface acre per year. Always purchase these baitfish from a commercial supplier who ensures species purity--attempting to seine minnows from a nearby creek may inadvertently introduce an undesirable species such as carp or suckers. According to biologists, a well-managed pond should support a harvest of 20 pounds of bass and 80 pounds of panfish per acre per year. It is important the panfish be harvested because they reproduce so rapidly that their numbers will otherwise throw the natural food chain out of balance. In such cases, all fish inhabiting the water will suffer food shortages and stunted growth. If you neglect to heed the advice of qualified pond specialists, your pond-building experience may be pure misery. But follow their sage advice to the letter, plant a few evergreens around the shoreline, add a picnic table as the final touch, and you'll have a little chunk of heaven. The topography of a proposed pond site is the primary influence on how much a pond will cost in hiring earth-moving equipment and in the number of labor hours needed to complete the job. But some price ranges can make it easier to estimate the cost. If a government agency such as the Soil Conservation Service does the design and engineering work, there is no charge for that part of the project. If a private engineering firm handles that phase, figure on $100 per hour. This includes on-site examination, survey work, soil tests, drainage-slope calculations, preparation of blueprints, and materials specifications. Currently, backhoe work averages $25 per hour, and 'dozer work costs approximately $40 per hour (prices include the use of the machinery, the operator's labor, fuels, and lubricants). Materials for spillway pipe, sheet metal baffles, perforated plastic toe-drain pipe, and embedding gravel should run about $400 for a 1/2-acre pond. Add another $200 for lime, grass seed, fertilizer, and straw mulch to restore the landscape to permanent vegetation. Stocking bass, bluegills, and channel catfish should come to no more than $100. Our own 1/2-acre pond cost us $5,100. If the majority of water filling your pond comes from a free-fiowing stream or surface run-off from higher ground, few problems arise. But if the water source is mainly an underground spring or artesian flow, it's likely to contain high levels of dissolved carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and iron (all are lethal to fish), and little oxygen, which is essential to aquatic life Consequently, as the pond basin begins to fill, before you stock fish, and then every two years, it's wise to have a water sample analyzed by your health department or a private diagnostic laboratory. Properly caring for the pond's dam is very important, The most common form of negligence is failure to mow the grass. If this isn't attended to several times each year, tree seedlings will sprout. Species such as tulip poplar, birch, and sassafras can grow as high as six feet per year and their ever spreading root masses will begin undermining the strength of the dam Similarly, allowing the dam area to grow up in tall grass and brush encourages burrowing creatures such as muskrat and groundhogs to take up residence The entire dam maybe riddled with a network of underground tunnels, and suddenly you'll begin noticing the water level in the pond is going down! Weed growth in the pond should be encouraged because it serves as habitat for fish and other aquatic creatures. Yet it must be controlled or the pond will become thoroughly infested. Cattails can be periodically pulled out by hand. Other vegetation is best controlled by liquid or pellet herbicides such as copper sulfate. Get a pond management handbook that tells you exactly how and when to apply these chemicals In the northern states where ice covers ponds during the winter, fish commonly die of oxygen starvation. The problem occurs when a thick blanket of snow covers the ice. blocks the sunlight, and curtails photosynthesis. On a small pond. ! crisscrossing the ice several times with a snow shovel will allow sufficient sunlight through. On larger ponds it may be necessary to use a lawn and garden tractor with a front blade to remove enough snow. Don't hesitate lo contact your county extension agent. Soil Conservation Service office, or state department of natural resources with with questions.-JOHN WEISS John Weiss is an outdoor writer from Chesterhill, Ohio. He built a farm pond several years ago to enhance wildlife habitat and improve his land's value. If you're sold on the idea of building yourself a pond, consider supplementing your income by raising fish. The Freshwater Aquaculture Book, written by marine expert William McLarney can help you not only research the feasibility of such a project, but execute it as well. It describes all aspects of freshwater fish-farming, covering scientific concepts and their practical applications. It examines 35 species of food fish and talks about energy efficiency, profitability, and ecosystems. In 600 large-format pages, illustrated with photos, charts, and tables, you can learn about pond construction and repair, water quality and chemistry, marketing, shipping, legal regulations, and disease. A section on fish cookery, a technical glossary, and a source list for supplies and training top off this comprehensive guide. The author's credentials to write such a book are extensive. Holding advanced degrees from the University of Michigan in fisheries and wildlife management, he has done years of research with the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, the U.S. National Fisheries Center, the' Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the New Alchemy Institute. He has written at least seven other references on fish-raising, fish behavior, pond maintenance, and balanced farm ecology. Order the book for $40 (10 percent off with enclosure of payment) from Hartley & Marks, P.O. Box 147, Pt. Roberts, WA 98281. |
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