spring-fed hand-dug pond, test digging

i've made posts about making a natural pond in the wet spot of my yard before!

finally managed to make a little video chatting about it. so far the (very small and shallow) test holes are full in fall and spring. we will see how they fare in summer

Right on! Thanks for posting. Gives me ideas, hahaha.

I think it was Joesph Lofthouse that made a homemade pond by digging it by hand.

I have long since said, a little bit everyday can accomplish a lot.

Think about it. If you move 8 wheelbarrows full of overburden every day, in two months time you would have dug 120 cubic yards or 10 medium sized dump truck loads.

I only have a 1 cubic yard trailer, but when I had to have 350 cubic yards from a half mile away, a guy was going to charge me $7000 to move my own gravel. Instead I moved 1 cubic yard, 10 times a day, and in 35 days moved those 350 cubic yards.

Steve Zoma wrote:

I only have a 1 cubic yard trailer, but when I had to have 350 cubic yards from a half mile away, a guy was going to charge me $7000 to move my own gravel. Instead I moved 1 cubic yard, 10 times a day, and in 35 days moved those 350 cubic yards.

i love that!! i was inspired a lot by this dude who has a youtube channel called edible acres. he's been directing and collecting water on his property for like 11 years and it seems like a similar landscape/climate to mine (he's in new york and i'm in nova scotia). all hand-dug stuff slowly over time and responding to how water naturally moves and making adjustments. it looks a bit messier than a professional pond but it's pragmatic and i'm not going all-out over many acres like he did, just one small area, like 1/4 acre.

i researched our soil type and (perched) water table and stuff all winter. i checked the holes this week and the water is really low in them, which makes sense because all the snow is gone so obviously, a lot of the water in the first foot of soil is seepage and not spring, which is obvious to me. this gives me an opportunity to dig down deeper and see how far the table is. it's perfect because there is a spot not too far from the pond that really needs to be levelled out so i can grow stuff in it. nice to do things slowly and by hand so that if you end up wanting to abandon it, you didn't go too big too quickly and spend a bunch of money on it!!


and the E X C E R C I S E!!! free gym membership right in my backyard lol

I am not far away in Maine. Here the water table drops by a foot this time of year because of all our trees. As they go into bloom, they literally suck a foot of water out of the ground. In the fall it goes back up by a foot.

I can really see it in my gravel pit. At the water table there is a foot of clay where the water table has risen and fallen over several thousand years.

I have had my dump trailer for about 5 years now, and in that time I have moved 2000 cubic yards of gravel… 1 cubic yard at a time. It’s amazing how much work “ a little, but all the time”, can accomplish.