Joel Albertsson

Hello Cristo! Thank you very much for your reple. Just the kind I need.

I will get back to the drawing table and rethink the size and placement of the ponds a bit. The connectors are definitly way to long, I thought that while drawing but I just got carried away i guess. I can probably take away the pond to the south all together and the one on the right of the paddock aswell. Probably wont need a connector to the lowest pond then either. Perhaps a monk so I can empty the main pond which I think I will make a little bit smaller.

A one acre pond is huge, its many times times the size of the biggest of these pond, or am I making a mistake in my conversion from hectares to acres. Anyway my question is, at what size do you think a pond goes from medium or low maintenance to very high?

Hello! I am working on the water systems for my property. I have been reading up on Keyline design and ponds and swales, watch Geoff lawtons DVD on making a pond and reading everything I can get my hands on by Sepp Holzer but I am still just a happy amateur and I have never actually done anything of this practically. So I would love some directions and critiques on my planning so far.

The top left pond on the sketch is a place where there is an old well and a bit below it there is a little ruin where there was a washing house in old times, the well is always full to the brim, probably because it takes in runoff water so I think it would be possible to dig it out and increase its volume a bit (?), next there is a place where water collects naturally, I think it takes alot of water because it is in a place that I would call a keypoint (maybe not correctly but it is the place where the valley starts to flatten and where the runoff is concentrated), all that water is at the moment passed by the horseriding paddock (the big flat area) and into the creek in the primary valley, I figure if I dig this area out and fill in the trench and dig a new one to collect the water in a third small pond/wetland/reedbed and then on to the main pond, from the main ponds spillway I plan to let the water go to a small pond on a flat surface where its generally pretty wet and then down to the lowpoint of the property to finally go down into the creek.

In the areas above the ponds there is shallow soil on bedrock so I think runoff is high, down where the valley starts to plain out I have high clay content. I have not yet found any good guide to calculate the volume for the ponds so they are just fantasy sized right now. Would love to get some help with this.

Some questions. Are there to many ponds? Will the water travel through the ditches or will it infiltrate on the way and not reach the next pond? Maybe I should just fill in the ditch above the paddock and let the water go straight from the second pond down into the main pond? in theory it would be great to be able to let the water travel such a long way. I can also collect all the water on the barn roof, which is maybe 90 m2 of corrugated steel roof on each side of the roof top, to the main pond.

I also include a map of some of the land forms and flows I have observed.

Thanks!