Forum:

ponds

In Progress: From nasty surface runoff to native plants and minnows

Harmony Dybala

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posted 1 year ago

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I’m taking the risk of publishing a project in progress that is currently extremely unglamorous.
My mom’s little patch of land where I am currently living has been very near the bottom of the local drainage basin, so that a lot of lawns and driveways send their rain right here. The soil is largely red clay. We had a pond dug near the back and bottom of our patch to help control flooding, and it seems to be working so far. Now to cultivate, and control how the water gets there.

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"[6] Let the people, O God, confess to Thee: let all the people give praise to Thee: [7] The earth hath yielded her fruit. May God, our God bless us, [8] May God bless us: and all the ends of the earth fear Him." (Psalms 66/67)

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Harmony Dybala

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Amphibian life is flourishing

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Harmony Dybala

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I have planted a few Sagittaria latifolia, Pontederia Cordata, Ceratophyllum demersum, Limnobium spongia, Azolla caroliniana, and Typha latifolia. I also planted a packet’s worth of marshmallow seeds. I look forward to seeing which plants (hopefully all) survive and grow. I anticipate needing to buy more, but some plants might not thrive here and others might boom in population. I think the water is way too high in nutrients after this last rain, based on bacteria and algae activity. (More on that later.)

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Harmony Dybala

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These are the two main inlets of water onto our property. They bring with them revolting brown clumps and biofilms.

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Harmony Dybala

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The frogbit is spreading!

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Harmony Dybala

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posted 1 year ago

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Some of the hornwort unfortunately is struggling against brown algae

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Devin Randall

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posted 1 year ago

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Nice! Cattails would go nuts around that.

Biology is applied chemistry.

Harmony Dybala

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I hope so! I planted a few and we’ll see how they do; I may order a bunch more when finances allow

Harmony Dybala

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In the main pond, the hornwort and flourishing tadpoles have attracted a banded water snake, the frogbit continues to thrive, and lots of long jawed orbweavers have taken up residence along the margins.

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Sara Hartwin

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Harmony Dybala wrote:I’m taking the risk of publishing a project in progress that is currently extremely unglamorous.

I'm so glad you risked it, and I hope the pictures keep coming, whatever happens.
It's immeasurably helpful to see the unglamorous (challenges and setbacks) alongside the wins.

I especially love seeing the system grow in complexity (predators coming in, competition)!

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Jay Angler

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Harmony Dybala wrote:

I think the water is way too high in nutrients after this last rain, based on bacteria and algae activity.

Some of the yuck can be from pollen - the pollen levels are incredible this year on my homestead. So yes, it looks yucky but it's nature's yuck.

Getting anything growing that you can harvest is the best way I've found to decrease the nutrient load. I use Lemna "duck weed" which I can scoop off and put as mulch on some of my shrubs. It picks up a lot of algae as well as I scoop it up. My idea is to transfer those nutrients from the water onto plants/soil/microbes, so they don't overwhelm the pond.

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Devin Randall

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Location: Zone 10b, SoCal

posted 1 year ago

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I love seeing all the tadpoles!

Biology is applied chemistry.

Harmony Dybala

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posted 1 year ago

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I observe a pattern now of rain clearing the water, then causing a brown goop and sheen bloom the next day which generally lasts several days until the next rain. (We’re in a rainy season right now.) The plants, arthropods, and amphibians seem to be unharmed by this long term, but I need to shift the balance of power from algae and bacteria to plants if I want the ponds system to be hospitable to fish and people. I’m planning to reinforce the azolla moss (which has mostly been washed away by overflow) and add cattails and duckweed as recommended by Mr. Randall and Mr. Angler.

I think the Cattails, strategically placed, will also help with a secondary concern of bank erosion, which has made some beautiful earth formations but I don’t want to continue into the walkway.

A frog has started diligently guarding the tadpoles everyday, and I haven’t seen the snake again since the frog made his or her appearance. A coincidence, or has the zealous parent succeeded in intimidating him?!

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Jane Mulberry

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posted 1 year ago

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If I saw the "giant tadpole" in our pond, I would think it was a newt! It looks like the ones we get here in the UK.

I'm only 64! That's not to old to learn to be a permie, right?

Jay Angler

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Yes - I would be worried about that erosion too.

We needed a culvert in our "winter creek" - OK, it's a glorified gully, but that's what the map calls it. We have not shortage of rocks, so I looked for large, flat ones and reinforced both areas at the ends of the culvert. This has worked great, and there are a few more areas that would benefit from the right sort of rocks as we now have geese and ducks who consider this their winter playground.

Water doesn't simply "pour" - it swirls and forms eddies and in areas where the water enters and exits anything that will affect its speed, can result in either deposition of material or erosion. Plants may be enough to spread and slow the water (I'm thinking cattail-sized plants with a significant root system).

However, consider where there might be spots to install a wimpy version of a "beaver dam analog" which is wood posts hammered into the ground across the waterway, and then small branches are woven through the posts to make like a basket to slow the water. The true version would actually allow water to build up behind it, but I'm just looking at the "slow and spread" level, particularly while the plants are getting established. If you use soft wood, it will rot away soon enough.

(FYI - I'm a female "Jay" - no offence taken, as I'm well aware that in your area of the US, Jay is always a male name.)

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Harmony Dybala

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Today the sun is hot and bright. The small pond is smelling horrid and looking very gummed up, but there were exciting new animal-spottings in the main pond!

I had a very hard time catching them on camera, but there are very tiny silvery fish among the tadpoles. The slender shapes and pectoral fins mark them apart from the amphibians.

(Also, pardon me, Ms. Angler 😅 I really should check bios if I’m gonna use honorifics)

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Phil Stevens

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This is so cool, watching nature claim a formerly "abandoned" and mostly lifeless space. I was thinking about the brown goo and smell, signs of an excess of nutrients in the runoff. The old-timers used to put a bale of straw into a pond when it went smelly from spring runoff. You might want to try that, or a burlap bag filled with biochar. There's a guy I know in Michigan who is cleaning up polluted ponds and small lakes with biochar by putting bags in with weights attached to sink them about halfway down. He puts floating markers on them and hauls them up after a few months, spreads the biochar on farmland, and puts fresh material in.

Putting straw bales at the mouths of the inlets would trap sediment, too. Just a thought.

Harmony Dybala

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Good news and bad news from the ponds today.
I was delighted to find crawdads, an aquatic snail in the main pond, and to get a picture of a weird swimming invertebrate with pinchers. I was saddened to see a bullfrog that had been wounded, and just when I had skimmed the biofilm off the small pond and transplanted some tadpoles to it in hopes they would help de-scum it, the Texas heat got the best of the water and dried it down to mud. So, I moved a bunch of beached frogbit from the small, dry pond to the big one. I am now looking for plants that will do better than floating frogbit at managing both flooded and merely muddy conditions.

At the big pond, I have gotten started on the bank reinforcement with some old bricks, irises, a wild violet I dug up at my last home and had been keeping in a pot, some Turk’s Cap from a good friend’s garden, and some lovely Ageratum from a local garden store. (I haven’t gotten pictures of all the new plants yet, but I will update tomorrow.) As the rains come down again this evening, let’s see how the defenses hold!

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Mason Berry

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I'm sorry - is this thread in real-time? This progress seems so fast! And how the heck did those fish get in there?!

This is so encouraging. I've been thinking on and off of the zen of accepting our present reality - poisons, toxins, and all - and offering it back to nature. It feels embarrassing to offer her such poor sacrifices, but she is the only one who can make them good and whole again. What are we to do with the zillions of miles of asphalt roads, the mounds and microfilaments of plastic, the too-rich seas and air and the impoverished soils? I've been thinking, more and more, exactly the kind of thing that you're doing with your neighbor's runoff.

Very inspiring - please continue to share!

Derek Thille

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posted 11 months ago

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Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

I was thinking along the lines of Phil in terms of something to act as a filter at the inlets. In some waterworks, I believe a sand filter would be used to trap sediment and provide space for life which would use some of the excess nutrients. Creating something akin to a bog with plants that will filter could also work.

I too enjoy the return to life and your excitement at seeing the progress.

Working toward a permaculture-strong retirement near sunny Sperling.

Harmony Dybala

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posted 11 months ago

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Thank you, Mason Berry, and everyone! (I really didn’t expect this much attention)

It’s not quite real time: looking back, I realize I didn’t date the earliest photos and for that I apologize! The hole for the main pool was dug in July of last year, and there was a latency period, which I can take no credit, while the pond sealed, established a balance with the water table, and got its biome started.

About a month ago, I started planting and documenting the cultivation on this thread, and the updates since then have been pretty much real-time.

It’s been wonderful seeing how quickly the plants have taken hold, and how diverse and vibrant the animal life has become! There’s so much we can’t control, but we can be faithful to our roles and see what good God brings out of everything. The resilient organisms around us are capable of so much regeneration if we cooperate and give them a chance to do what they’re designed for.

The new edge plants came through the rain alright, and although I wasn’t able to get good photos of them, I saw legs on large tadpoles today and the banded water snake again.

Harmony Dybala

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posted 11 months ago

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Photos from this morning:

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Cristo Balete

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posted 11 months ago

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Harmony, looks like a very successful project!

I have a good-sized pond and I would NOT recommend cattails. They grow rampantly, require yearly maintenance, and are very difficult to pull out, and have tried to fill in the sides of my pond. Pulling them never entirely gets the roots, and they double and triple with ease. It was the pond-building technique around here, and they were already on my pond when I bought the place. I rue the day they ever planted those things. Where I have managed to keep them at bay, where there roots were needs to be dug out by big equipment which I am not in the mood to pay for someone to do it.

You'll see volunteer plants/pond vines/duckweed that blow in, are brought in on the feet of birds and ducks. Research whatever shows up because a lot of it is traveling around the world helped by bird feet, like red Azola. A lot of them will also fill in your pond unless they are immediately dealt with. A year skipped will allow them to grow and overtake that area.

I really enjoy my pond, but it's a labor of love - a lot of labor!!

:-)

Mediterranean climate, hugel trenches, fabulous clay soil high in nutrients, self-watering containers with hugel layers, keyhole composting with low hugel raised beds, thick Back to Eden Wood chips mulch (distinguished from Bark chips), using as many native plants as possible....all drought tolerant.

Harmony Dybala

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posted 11 months ago

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Toad eggs today!

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Harmony Dybala

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Rain has been kicking our butts out here. It just keeps coming, storms every couple of days with trees blown down, power outages, and flooding. Pond is going to have to deal with it for now.

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Jay Angler

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Harmony Dybala wrote:Rain has been kicking our butts out here. It just keeps coming, storms every couple of days with trees blown down, power outages, and flooding. Pond is going to have to deal with it for now.

Mother Nature's ponds are pretty resilient. Once the weather calms down, I'm sure you will find ways to give her a helping hand.

With that bad of weather, it may help you see where changes and reinforcements are most needed. One thing the experts seem to talk about is the need to "slow and spread" the water. So for example, this picture, IMG_2323.jpeg shows a fairly straight channel. You might find ways to dig that to be more of an "s" curve, or several curves with flat rocks protecting the banks where the water pressure will be greatest during storms.

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Harmony Dybala

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I miss the flooding rains.

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Harmony Dybala

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posted 10 months ago

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I worked on using rocks and new plants to control water flow when the next rains come and tried to mitigate evaporation, but the fish died off night before last. For now, this is the story of how I had a pond.

My suspicions: just not deep enough to maintain a stable thermal mass against the heat of the summer sun. Someday I would like to dig a bigger pond, taking into account what I have learned about surface runoff erosion, filter plants, and flooding.

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Harmony Dybala

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posted 10 months ago

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Still, I have plants doing their best

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Derek Thille

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Die-off could be temperature related, but it could also be a lack of oxygen. Of course, if it dries to nothing, some organisms will definitely die off. Perhaps a few shovels removed from the pond bed might be enough for it to manage through the next dry season. Having more plants on the south side shading the ponds could also help with evaporation. I'd look to find what is a native pond / stream edge plant that could fill that niche.

Nature is incredibly resilient. You may be surprised at what comes back the next time things fill up.

Working toward a permaculture-strong retirement near sunny Sperling.

Jay Angler

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Yes, the pond doesn't have to be deep evenly. In fact, many "growing" ponds are done as ledges and steps with 1 to 2 foot drops straight down at the edge of flat ledges. The ledges could be supported with rocks, but I've seen pictures of this sort of thing that aren't.

We needed a settling pond to slow run-off up-slope of a pipe under a farm lane. It has a very deep area near the pipe inlet, but I was concerned that animals might fall in and not be able to get out, so we sloped one side up slowly to the west. Unfortunately a tree came down and blocked my access, so it's having to manage itself at the moment.

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Joe Hallmark

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It’s not unusual in Texas this time of year to lose an inch per day. Even in rainy east Texas you have to have it pretty deep to make it through July / august heat. A lot of the runoff plants you want to absorb won’t die off or will have dropped seed etc so next rain event they should continue helping.

So far every water plant I have showed up on its own. Tons of cattails in my main runoff. They are really good a filtering everything because it’s not the most clean ditch/valley. But it’s pretty clean after going through 100-150’ of cattail.

Still a bummer to have it go dry and lose fish. I lost a lot year before last.

Carla Burke

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Eek... poor fish & plants. Is there any way that you can dig it deeper, while it's so low?

"The only thing...more expensive than education is ignorance."~Ben Franklin
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Harmony Dybala

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Yes, I can get down in there and do some old-fashioned shoveling while it’s low. I suppose the soil in there would be pretty fertile for building up compost.

Jane Mulberry

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So sorry you lost your fish. I don't think there's any way to know how deep will be deep enough until something like this sadly happens.

I'm only 64! That's not to old to learn to be a permie, right?

Harmony Dybala

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On Saturday it was a mudhole with dead fish like you saw, but Ex-hurricane Beryl hit on Monday, filling the pond completely! To my great astonishment this morning, lots of smaller fish survived the die-off, and there’s already a new cohort of tadpoles!

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Jay Angler

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Nature is soooo... amazing! That's suggesting to me that if you can just get a few deep areas dug that hold water longer and keep the mud damp, lots of life will survive. This is an experiment - some of the things you wish you had won't end up being able to cope with "boom and bust", but there are plants and animals out there designed to do just that!

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Jane Mulberry

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I am amazed at those fish!

I'm only 64! That's not to old to learn to be a permie, right?

Suzie Park

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Location: Austin, Texas area

posted 9 months ago

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Harmony Dybala wrote:On Saturday it was a mudhole with dead fish like you saw, but Ex-hurricane Beryl hit on Monday, filling the pond completely! To my great astonishment this morning, lots of smaller fish survived the die-off, and there’s already a new cohort of tadpoles!

We got almost 5" of rain in Burnet, Texas within days including last Monday and Tuesday. It was marvelous. Glad to see your critters are reproducing again! Ahhhh. I agree with the stepped up method if your pond goes dry enough again. My brother's father-in-law has a small decorative pond and he says part of it is very deep so the fish can hide from predators.

I love your ongoing project by the way - you didn't overthink it; you just started it and let nature find a way. :)

Eternal optimist, passionate about revitalizing the land, awake but conscious of how illusive truth really is. Much love to all!

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