Permie Pond Pictures!

Travis Johnson wrote:I do not have any pictures of the ponds on the ground, but three years ago I built these two ponds at a children's camp. It was a "water feature" for their horse pasture. Luckily, I hit a spring when I was digging the upper pond, which by a culvert, fills the lower pond.

That's neat Travis, looks like quite a job! That's nice it's spring fed, I bet that helps maintain a constant water level.

Dale Hodgins wrote:My Little Pond doesn't look like much. These pictures were taken shortly after constructions. But it is adjacent to a large wet area owned by a Timber Company. If I suck the water out, it flows back in from beneath. So instead of capturing water, this one simply makes it easy to access a high water table. Even in the driest part of summer, this little pond brings in water.

My phone was acting up because of too many pictures and it turns out that I eliminated all but one from the pond. The water has cleared up nicely now.

That's really cool Dale! Did you dig it by hand or by machine?

Are any fish or other creatures living in it now?

Steve Thorn wrote:

That's really neat how they are so different in color, and how clear the second pond is, I think I can even see the stumps in the top right portion of the pond. Do any fish live in the sediment pond?

I put minnows in for mosquito larvae control. I added crawdads but should have waited a year before adding them. A freshly dug pond has very little vegetation, so very little for them to eat.

Not sure if this is true, but my guess is that racoons are eating the crawdads. I say this because there are tracks all around the pond. Like they are walking around scouting. With little vegetation and a lot of sorghum and millet seeding on the shoreline, i think the crawdads are leaving the water at night to eat. Totally a guess, but i have not seen carcasses around the edge. Crawdad pinchers, etc.

This is our pond last spring when it was full. It is almost empty right now. Come to find out our pond is not permitted, as is a kind that is not allowed in Oregon, but I don't really know if it matters because nobody has been knocking on our door about it.

My mistake, wrong picture. My eyes aren't what they used to be. Let's try this again.

If you are looking for ideas on how to build the pond, my suggestion is to really look at a bulldozer. It is okay to use an excavator to pull out the bulk of the material, but really a good pond uses a bulldozer to shape the sides. That is because a bulldozer smooths the pond liner and really helps it seal up well, where as with an excavator, it can be more dug and pitted. The bulldozer tracks also help to lock in the rocks in the subsurface too. I really like the two machine approach because with pond building...my pond building anyway, as soon as I start moving dirt, rains come, and with a bulldozer you have to get in the middle and push outward, whereas with an excavator you can reach in and pull the material out. But as I said, a bulldozer always shapes the sides of the pond better.

If you are okay with lily pads and cattails, you will want a very shallow pond edge, because that lets in light to the bottom of the pond, and those sort of things grow. But if you want to stop that, you want a very steep bank which will stop them from growing.

Myself, and this is a personal thing, I always though islands in the middle were kind of fun. Give something for the kids to swim for, a place a gazebo, or put a deckhouse without animals getting to them. But that is just me and my island in the middle of a pond fetish.

Those sound like some great tips Travis.

I've always envisioned having a pond one day with an island too, for all the reasons you mentioned.

If I build a pond soon, it will probably be a very tiny pond, maybe I could fit a tiny island in there.

I would love to have a big pond one day with a good sized island, that would be a lot of fun!

this is what i call the downstream pond



this is the beaver dam holding it back


actually there is another tiny pond below this dam and then it drops another few feet

this was what the upstream pond used to look like


and the dam between them , you can see the downstream pond behind the dead trees


unfortunately that dam washed out and has not yet been rebuilt
there is only a small puddle and a meadow for now
at one point on google maps the upstream pond appeared to be about 4 acres

i would like to use some of the meadow material to make an earthbermed greenhouse ... and to make chinampas..
so when it is rebuilt it will be deeper and have the chinampas along the margins
beavers need the depth so they dont get frozen into their lodge so they should benefit too

My pond two months after earthworks have been completed. It will get final shape when all trees and bushes planted around it grow a bit, as well as water plants.

This pond is now 3 years old.  We have trout in it and it’s not as clear as I would like to see it but it’s in a bowl of the land so it gets run off besides the springs.