Building a 5 Acre Bass Pond!! (Day 4)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] downtown [Music] folks at home welcome back to the five acre pond build and if you missed the first videos in this series i'll put a link down in the description below but today we have not only one of the big blue tractors but we brought in a second one for reinforcements because our goal is to excavate a lot of the dirt in the shallow parts of the pond and move it to the back side of the dam but just to get everyone caught up the first week we started working on our l-shaped dam and we got that core trench completed and we also got the drain pipe installed that goes through the back side of the dam and we're building this pond on a slope so everything flows downhill so right around the dam area is going to be 15 feet deep and then that mid-range pond level will be around 8 feet and so we don't have to do any excavation there anywhere that's less than five feet deep we're going to excavate all of that dirt out and get it moved over to the back side of the dam and our target depth and that shallow area is going to be around six feet deep because we also have to come in with a two foot clay blanket which would give us four feet of water and we finalized on a location for the island it's gonna be right out in the center we'll talk more about that later and so in the last video i was joking around saying that the big blue tractor runs the daytona 5 acre because all he does is make laps around the pond but i'm going to take you through one quick lap of what his day is going to look like the rest of this week so he starts off getting loaded up with dirt and this is a little bit of a sandy soil that can't be used to hold water so we're going to use it to build that nice slope off the back side of the dam that'll go from about 15 feet high down the ground level and another benefit is you can't really grow grass on clay so we'll use this good soil to put right over the top of the dam and on the back slope and those grass roots will help keep everything from eroding so here we're just lining everything out one layer at a time but it is almost guaranteed that a few times each day this big tractor is going to get stuck it's inevitable so we just used other pieces of equipment to push them out and i'd love to own some of this heavy machinery because it's been really impressive to see what all they can get done and some of the sticky situations they can get out of and except for this time the dirt trailer started sliding down the hill so we had to use the excavator and scoop the dirt out and got him right back on track and one other small issue right after we got the trailer completely loaded with dirt we realized one of the big tires was flat so we had to dump all the dirt out and go fix the flat good times so here's a look from the other angle at the bulldozer doing the work on spreading all of that dirt out and just on the inside of where he's spreading that's the core trench so as soon as we can start hauling the clay back in we're going to compact clay in there and build that dam up to the same height as the dirt and on average the tractor's been making about 15 miles a day so just using one excavator and tractor it would take us about a week to get this entire shallow area excavated now so far we've hauled in around 250 truckloads of clay but we still need 600 more and that'll be used to finish up building the dam and to line the entire pond so all we need is some good weather and a little bit of sunshine but as you know we live in one of the rainiest parts of the country so we're almost guaranteed to get a thunderstorm every afternoon and sometimes we can work through it but a lot of times it'll completely shut the clay trucks down for the day so one of the guys building my pond is a fish biologist and also owns a hatchery and we got to talking about the type of fish that we're going to stock in the pond so obviously the two pet bass are coming in first but the other type of bass that we're going to add in here with them is called a tiger bass and it's well known for being one of the most aggressive species of bass just picture moby when you think about it but we got to talking about the genetics and the way they create this f1 tiger bass is they mix a florida strain bass with a northern strain bass now florida strain bass can get really big easily get over 10 pounds but they're really lazy they would like nothing more than to just sit under a log and eat one massive bluegill every day now on the other hand the northern bass are extremely aggressive but because they live in the northern states their growing season is a lot shorter because of the cooler temperatures so even though they're really aggressive they never get really big so a while back they started breeding the two and that's where the f1 tiger bass came from but one of the interesting things he was telling me is you can do a genetic test and see exactly which genetics a bass has so for instance a pure florida strain mixed with a pure northern strain at a 50 50 ratio that would create that tiger bass but there will sometimes be a little bit of a variation in that so for instance a bass may have 52 genetics of a northern strain and 48 on a florida strain and typically you'll see those fish even more aggressive because they have a little bit more of that northern genetic in them as opposed to if you're wanting to do more of a trophy pond and a little higher percentage of that florida strain your bass may get a little bit bigger but either way that tiger bass is a perfect combination of an aggressive fast growing fish and it's really easy for them to gain three pounds in a year so when they initially stock them they're only two inches long and he was telling me you have to get them into a pond where they can eat on forage pretty quick because if they stay in the hatchery too long even at two inches they'll start eating each other and it looks like we're gonna end up getting a pond full of moby's now let's talk for just a second about another project i have at the farm and we have 80 acres that's about 60 acres in peanut fields and 20 acres of woods and one of my goals here was to attract as much wildlife as possible that includes deer turkeys doves quail and they all have a wide variety of diets so earlier this year we started planting different crops for them so the animals like turkey doves and quails they love seeded plants so we planted sunflowers brown top millet and sorghum and you can see this field has a combination of all three but each of these plants produces a lot of seeds and overall in this field there will be hundreds of thousands of seed to attract that wildlife but this is the first year i've ever actually planted sunflowers and they all did really good and yep it's just like the sunflower seeds you eat at the baseball park and once the sunflower matures there will be hundreds of seeds in each flower now for the deer and some of the bigger animals we planted soybeans and you can see some of those are starting to bud and then we did several rows of corn because you can't go wrong with corn everything loves corn and we set up a game camera because you can tell by some of the tracks in here that right after that corn grew they've been in here munching which is good that's what it's for we'll come out and get some for our family but the rest of it was planted for the wildlife here's a quick look at the deer they're starting to hit all the crops pretty hard and they keep putting on that antler growth so the guys are making good progress on the excavation and we're getting pretty close to the area we're going to build the island which that reminds me so we're running this contest to see who can come up with the best name for our pond and in the first few videos we've gotten really good comments and one of the comments that stood out was this guy said you should name the pond alcatraz because of the two bandits bonnie and clyde which i thought was a great idea but alcatraz was a jail on an island so i thought hey that'd be the perfect name for the island in the middle of the pond so the island that we're building in this pond is going to be called alcatraz island and we'll probably use some of that wood to make a wooden sign that's the kind of ideas i'm looking for you guys to leave me down in the comments below because i hope we can have a lot of fun with this pond over the next few years so the dam's still coming along we're finally getting up to around its final height and before we can do much more we're gonna have to get some of that clay hot in so we can keep the progress going so things have been moving along pretty good today we had hauled about as much as you could haul and hadn't had too many breakdowns or mishaps but we saw on the radar that we were about to get a flash flood which is not really what you want whenever you're at this stage of the pond build so if we get a heavy rain a lot of that rain can flow down through the drain pipe and out of the pond but you still don't want it washing all of the dirt that they just grated out so some rain is no big deal but heavy rain is not what you're looking for but unfortunately that's what we got and they are saying that some of these areas are going to get three inches in one hour and i believe it because it is coming down so this went on for about three hours and the bad news is it completely shut the project down but the good news is that it happened on a friday so at least we have the weekend to let everything dry up and another good thing is it's going to let us see what our watershed looks like we have enough of the pond dug out now we can actually see where the water is coming from and how quickly it's going to fill up so we probably have enough clay in and that cord trench is probably going to leave some pooling water that doesn't flow through the drain pipe so that was one of the hardest rains i've seen in quite a long time but let's go see the damage well you wanted to fill up and hold water but not before you get done building it man look at that it's almost going to topple the dam over there we hadn't completely finished building that dam up on that side that's about the the top height of the levee right there and you can see it's a little bit lower in that corner and luckily we kind of came through here with the bulldozer and cut that off to keep water from flowing down there and send it over there towards the drain pipe and that did as it was supposed to and kind of flushed all of that out of there but as you can see this level was a little bit higher and there wasn't a good ditch for that to flow i'm hoping that we don't go over the top there but we'll see there's almost enough water you can make a cast in it let's check out the rest well we got us a natural waterfall so that's the area that we get all the watershed there's a ditch right there that runs the length of the property and the water that comes off that hill goes down in there and that's what initially caused all that erosion one of the reasons we're building a pond in this location because all that water washes down this property right through there you can see this is the spot we were excavating out and this water had no way to make it all the way down there so it's just going to puddle up right here so it's fun to see how all the water flows and it makes it into and out of the pond just a little bit frustrating whenever you need to get the pond completed before we have all this heavy rain and this literally just came out of nowhere it was just a flash flood that just popped up and we got about three inches of rain in a little over an hour now it's time to check in on some of our pets and today is a big day for our two smallest pets we have a turtle named squirt and a baby crawfish named sebastian and today we're moving them from the aquarium to the backyard pond all right so we're out here at the ninja turtle pond i think that we got two baby ninja turtles left in here the rest of them have made it up there to the big pond but now we're gonna go in with a baby squirt and he's growing a little bit he's still a little bitty tiny turtle aggressive fun friendly let's check him out i may set him down right here and see if he'll crawl out to his new home we'll put him right there so there's a spot right in between those three plants that when the turtles get out they'll burrow down in that mulch right over there so sometimes they're out of the pond sometimes they're in it but we just did a water change so you can see everything and they're pretty good and i think they're burrowed down so there's sebastian the crawfish i thought i was recording whenever i put him in there but i wasn't but he actually made it to the turtle pond and looks like he's exploring all the new rocks definitely may not see him much because there's so many rocks so many places to hide but i got a little gopro in there we'll try to record during feeding times and see if we can get him out about squirt exploring his new home he was definitely a fun little turtle we're going to miss him inside the house sarah loved watching him but i know he's going to love it in the outdoors in his natural setting and here's him hanging out with one of the original ninja turtles but squirt is gonna have to get a little faster at eating because if he waits around long the other turtles are gonna eat the food up and we put up a little time lapse to watch him come out and bask on the wood throughout the day looks like he's enjoying the new home and this is our cat buster he loves hanging out over here around the waterfall it puts him to sleep and check this out guys the caterpillar that liz found out at the farm made a cocoon the only problem is the branch that it was on actually snapped off liz is thinking about sewing that back on we'll have a butterfly before long and this is foxy the fox squirrel we haven't seen him in a while out at the farm but he's coming to look at the new watering hole all right folks another week another thousand shiners bonnie's down there she's ready to go she knows it's feeding time so just for a quick timeline on when bonnie and clyde may go into the new pond so we're going to stock it full of bait this winter that's one of the best times to move all your forage fish like your shad and bluegills so really anytime after we get it stocked with all the bait we can move them into it so what i'm going to do is measure this backyard pond temperature and then measure the new pond temperature and i'm going to try to find a day to where the water temps are really close together i'd like to do it just before the spring so i'm thinking maybe january or february if we don't have a really cold winter and i'll probably just use the live well in my boat to transport them as always we saved the best for last time to feed mr moby [Music] so [Music] [Music] all right folks that's going to wrap up the video make sure to hit that subscribe button so you can follow along with the future videos in this pond series it won't be long we'll be adding water but i hope you all enjoyed this one and we will see you all next time [Music]

Channel: BamaBass

Views: 352,659

Rating: 4.9556713 out of 5

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Id: QmG8dmtany8

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021