Amazing *FARM POND* Renovation

you guys weren't here the next day but by turning all the pumps on that green that covered the whole time that all in 80% of it was gone they know I feed him from here and you could just see him coming in like pigs to the trough I asked Ted earlier how long have you lived here and you said six generations so we are in beautiful Big Rock Illinois I'm with Edie blue my longest teammate I'm Greg what's like the pond guy this is my channel Greg would suck the pond guy and this is all about living the aquascape lifestyle and this is a very very special build that we created for a really cool place what is this place so this is called mccannon farm they have a program here called farm friends and this is a non-for-profit where they have people special needs that are coming out on a weekly basis and they give them a farm experience so they get their hands dirty they'll do gardening they have animals here on the property they go fishing in this beautiful lake and to fund that they have a variety of different events here including weddings which helps to pay for the grounds and all the other stuff that are here four years ago we came in with 300 certified aquascape contractors and we created this masterpiece [Music] and this is the personal property outside McCann right Shannon how you going buddy good to see dreamed about it for a long time the pond was dug back in the fifth third nineteen fifty and we thought that when we took over the property we wanted to do something with it and so we read dug the pond but all the spoil that waterfall is not always wanted a water feature took 20 years so then ed came in here with the idea because Ed's wife Ellen actually worked with farm friends and farm friends is basically a non-for-profit that works with young adults typically that have special needs yeah so when Ellen sat on our board and the more she was here on the farm she just fell in love and the next thing you know if she ended up buying the farm next door I see the tent already set up he just had a wedding here and we have an Oktoberfest on the 15th I think that'll be at that one craft beer you know you were talking about how so many people come here they drive sometimes you know cuz of the Facebook post I'm pretty far away oh yeah like the wedding we just had yeah they came across farm friends come across the property itself and saw what we did for people with special needs they live clearing in the end of three hours away or more maybe four and they decided that they wanted to give back rather than go rent a hall and pay all that money out they wanted that money to go somewhere where they knew it was going to use Ted what was this water feature like before and what is it like now in terms of the maintenance in terms of the aesthetics if you came out here the before what aquascape did to the feature itself why you could have walked across it with the thick duckweed duckweed it was just totally covered with green and everything else so ed and the rest of us all work and we cleaned out the edge of the pond cleaned out all the debris from the last 40 years yeah 50 years and everything and worked on that portion of it and that and then aquascape came in and did their thing and what's so amazing is that you guys weren't here the next day but by turning all the pumps on that green that covered the whole time that all in 80% of it was gone I mean we were busy cleaning out Vall trying to haul it all away you can see we don't have duckweed yeah that's pretty impressive Ted how do you actually use the water feature for farm friends you know do you have activities in and around the water bring them out here so you really have that experience interface with nature and the water itself so they can get close to the wetlands and do things like that they can get through the edge of the water depending on the level of the people with disabilities sometimes like an Oktoberfest will have the kids out father Dan from the church is gonna have a fishing tournament because it is stocked with largemouth bass and some other fish on them probably enjoys that side over that so you know it's that real experience bringing them back to the life itself so the next part of our phase is put a stream in so these kids can get in that's never done right so here never is incredible water feature here how many tons of stone - gee oh gosh 80 ton of stone yep but there was another 60 ton that we put in under the water holding everything in that was he donated that we know you don't have it's always a work in progress so now you want to want a stream coming in - coming up - those nice we're gonna put a patio on the opposite side of it and stuff it's never done this is how people live the aquascape lifestyle right here [Music] so ad I was here last year every time I come this is its fourth season it gets more and more filled in and the ecosystem people use me Opie giant fishing here exactly you said some of these fish came from your home here they came from my palm because when we sold the place we knew it was over stocked with fish so what better home than right here I come out here in the morning and this is kind of a ritual so they know about 7:00 7:30 and they hear the cart coming across the yard so as I come across I park and I walk up here and they know this is the area that they get fed this is the main wetland so we have multiple pumps that are feeding this system we have one pump that is just dedicated to the wetland filter that one runs continuously we have three separate pumps that are going to the waterfall look at how full this is because of the nutrient load inside of this thing these plants just take off it's like a injecting of pure energy so they can come through they can split this they can sell the plants off he says twice a year you has to come and actually divide the plants is great so the challenge that we have here with an existing pond that is 60 almost 70 years old that was dug in 1950 is all that accumulated leaf debris on here it takes years but look at the water clarity right yes the water clarity look at a fair looks incredible you can see fish swimming out here when I first came out here you couldn't see this bass right here in the paper yeah there maybe you couldn't see anything because of the heavy weed growth because of the planktonic algae blooms as I said so now it's gonna take years just like an exercise program this pond was way out of shape it was overweight it needed an exercise program we started that in motion we have aerobics we have a good diet for the pond everything is happening it's gonna get better and better and better over good diet for the pond I like that so it might be the only guy that would ever actually use that phrase diet of the pond that area just to the left of the waterfall we designed that specifically for the bride and groom to stand in the bridal party to get a picture matched to that waterfall right so add one thing I remember about this was it was a complete mud bath because it had rained the morning of in the night before I remember staying awake at night listening to the thunder of the lightning everything crashing and my phone was getting lit up by everybody saying is it on and I'm like it's going yeah like we have no option we have to get this thing done there's no plan B so we're gonna make it happen and you know what everybody dug in that much harder and deep it was because of the cause everybody wanted to help the heart of the challenge the more they rise to the audition and then of course the reward is so much greater absolutely no actually you have accomplished that I mean I remember guys walking and their boots staying back and them coming out of their boot because of the mud out here but we had literally hundreds of guys who were trained out here to build this thing and this was kind of a unique design talk about how this whole thing actually worked so the way this is designed we've tried to set it up just like any other ecosystem we have a pumping system on one side the challenge that we have here is this water level fluctuates yes so we had to be able to manipulate it we put in these concrete piers we don't do all the time but that allows us to put in a series of boards you see those slots in there we could actually raise and lower the water level and that creates that skimming effect I mean just look at floating scum on the surface we've actually since you can see we added in a net inside of there's make it a little bit easier to clean it all out this is the part you have to clean on a regular basis but this is the point everything gets drawn in from here we're splitting the water off into multiple areas up to the waterfall over to the wetland and then that far side look at those jet everything is getting pushed back this way - we're turning the entire volume of this pond over two and a half times per day Wow so we're totally turning over the water which is the key and that's what's giving us the water clarity [Music] we have more pub faults we have the ability to do two pumps in each vault so we currently have five pumps but when we're doing the construction like this I usually put in extra vaults just in case so if we ever want to add anything and we've talked to Ted a little bit about doing some other streams and things like that we have the capacity to do that so each one of these we could open this up you can see we have pumps down inside these are all the ceramic nine pls these are feeding the waterfall we did multiple pumps instead of one big pump because Ted likes to be able to control the water flow so he could have one pump running the waterfall two or three the wetland runs continuously and the Jets run periodically just when you get that debris movement over there turns that on to push everything over here so it gives them a lot more control and here's the net to pull things out yep you're actually right behind you those are the board's that taken actually the boards I could put in there so we could adjust the water level according to the time of the year could you imagine if a developer actually started off with a subdivision with a pond this way versus having to try to have correct upon that had 60 years of debris building up exactly I mean it would make all the difference in the world so right now we're seeing a big difference but it's still an uphill battle so we have the filters we have bacterial treatments etc but if you started out probably in the beginning you're not fighting that you're working with nature you're creating that ecosystem and the whole system is gonna function that much more efficiently and outs of prevention is worth a pound of cure there are so many failing hundreds of thousands just in the US alone failing water features that were designed in as storm water management and subdivisions that get filled with all of the runoff from people's lawns and the chemicals that go in there and it's constantly feeding it's constantly a battle this is working with Mother Nature and not against her like a traditional dead system this is this would be a dentist and we made life to this system you know [Music] [Music] go ahead explain how you design these Jets so we have a jet output every 20 feet we have a 3-inch pipe that's running around the perimeter then we choked it down we dropped it down to a one inch fitting yep so that allows us to manipulate the water if we want we could raise or lower to again according to the time of the year but the goal of these is to create that push so now whenever I'm designing something I'm always looking at prevailing winds and the normal winds don't want to push debris into that corner so that helps so everything wants to go towards that skimmer but this is just gonna keep pushing all that stuff in that direction helps to turn the water over because if we didn't have these what would happen is we have the wetland there the waterfall there this would be a dead spot yeah so we wouldn't have good circulation algae would be bad at cetera you can even use a little bit more cuz it's such a big body of water and we just created up what we were actually calling up on powerhead yep we put in three four or five of those Ted would actually be able to pick it up and move it if there were different areas with when you're going to last and this is one of the things aquascape a deny they've been doing this together for 25 years we are the only manufacturer of water feature equipment in literally the world that builds water features so when we see a problem like this we have actually fix it so we didn't have pond power head no when we built this thing no but now we do so we're gonna come back and we're gonna put it in make this ecosystem even healthier and this is actually what aquascape is all about it's about innovating it's about creating it's about helping the ecosystem and it's about actually our passion is to make things better and so to actually be able to have where we're actually working with and checking these things out this could be a practical as Universal because every water feature could use that kind of circulation we're finding innovative solutions to real world problems so that's what we've done since the very first skimmer bio Falls wetland filters rainwater capture systems power heads you name it iein gens all these different things we had customers that had problems yeah we fixed it and it's fun the bottom we have a huge sedimentation trap over in there and that's what was great about this build is it was such a big site we added hundreds of certified contractors coming in but there are hundreds of thousands of these ponds like this all over the United States that loli died exactly so we want to train the guys exactly how to take care of it yeah so we had teams of people here we had teams of people over there we had a team over there and a team over there it's him on that site we had edge work we had these rock outcroppings because we wanted to change the shape of we had planting zones we had all that waterfall work we had plumbing we have typing on everybody working as a means to get this done and then we had a great party yeah that's the end of the night know all the food we got catered in here we got barbecue we had you know and everybody got to celebrate and see the fruits of their labor [Music] I haven't seen this water feature since last year it looks fantastic continue to enjoy it and if you want to see cool people doing phenomenal things like that is doing out here for the benefit of the community check out this channel share this blog so that more people could see what living the aquascape lifestyle is all about I love my job [Music]

Channel: Greg Wittstock, The Pond Guy

Views: 111,821

Rating: 4.9061832 out of 5

Keywords: farm pond, retention pond, fish pond, pond, ponds, pond installation, pond transformation, pond renovation, aquascape, greg wittstock, the pond guy

Id: UATbiYgW0Ms

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019