Can I make this into a small pond?

When I moved onto this property one of the first things I did after observing where the water pooled when the snow melted was dig out that area and fill it with wood chips. This is where the overflow from my rain barrels, and water from our rare rainstorms, ends up.

I recently dug out the nicely decomposed wood chips and was going to refill it with fresh ones, but I wonder if I could turn it into a small pond for the frogs and birds to enjoy instead?

The problem is the rock that is at the bottom. It's layered in with very sticky clay and when dug into it breaks into lots of sharp pieces. The water drains in about 12 hours, and dries out completely in 2 days if there's no fresh influx of water.

I could use permies' help to figure out if and how it could be turned into a small pond, or if I should just go back to the wood chip fill.

Good size for a bath tub pool. It's where my yellow flags recide and they're flowering now. They can deal with a lot of abuse and even drought doesn't kill them. Good cleaners, bringing oxygen in the mud.

It depends on how well your soil holds water, but  I would dig a bit more to make the whole thing worthwhile. Sepp Holzer has some videos on how to seal ponds. A packet of bentonite would help to seal it but watch these videos (I hope there's something in English)

Nicola Bludau wrote:It depends on how well your soil holds water, but  I would dig a bit more to make the whole thing worthwhile. Sepp Holzer has some videos on how to seal ponds. A packet of bentonite would help to seal it but watch these videos (I hope there's something in English)

Any and all digging at this point is less  digging and more breaking up the rock into small removable pieces. And the edges of those pieces (and any rock remaining in the hole) are very sharp.  I doubt I'd need outside clay to seal it since pretty much my entire yard is pottery worthy clay.  I've watched most of the Sepp videos, as well as the ones here on permies, about sealing ponds, but they seem to be in mostly sandy soil and not the rock that I have.

I've been toying with some similar ideas and experiments (similar climate and substrate) and can't recommend the pond scheme without significant interventions. Namely, line it with a membrane and supply regular supplemental water. Even with impermeable subsoil, water will quickly 'wick' outward through any adjacent topsoil, like draping a paper napkin into a glass of water. It's nice to have even a 3-season water feature in dry climates, so maybe worth the effort to engineer it on a small scale, but if it's not a priority for you I'd keep doing your prior strategy - I use basins like that as low profile compost / yard waste pits or to charge biochar over a season or two, much more effective than raised piles in dry climates.

I would consider uisng that hole as a sediment trap and building a pond downstream a little bit where there may not be rock.

I made this. With yellow flags is just a bathtub. Later I made the little pond. The gutter is feeding the IBC. The overflow straight goes there. And i can feed it tge water in the IBCt there's an underground reservoir I use to pump the IBC full with. It's never been empty the pond. Always got saved by some summer nightly storm so far. I don't know if you get those. But it's such a feature to the ecosystem...

Thanks Ben, I thought that might be the case.