FISHING POND BUILD HOLDS WATER!!! -POND UPDATE-

all right so this is going to make a lot of our viewers happy because this is probably the most requested video of all time on our channel and that is a pond update and it's not that i haven't wanted to do upon update i've wanted to do a lot of pond updates but it's never been to the point where i was proud to update it and there's been a lot going on so it's just little bitty things here and there and i didn't want to make a video for these little bitty things and bore people out of their minds so it's time for a big pond update and let me tell you it's a big update so if you guys remember when i got this place this was a little 20 yard by 20 yard little hole in the ground didn't hold any water surrounded by brush it's right in front of my house and i really always wanted a pond right in front of my house i said well the dirty got the structure of a pond in this little area why can't we just knock out this whole hillside and build a pond we'll clear it up with a brush and uh have a pond right here for my dad and i to fish which is something that i've always wanted so that's what we did we got in here we started pushing out with the bulldozer literally just cutting into the hillside and pushing up dirt on the back side it's a long ways down it's probably a good 25 feet or even more than that from the very top of the back side of the dam and when we got done with it a lot of people said you aren't ever going to get it to hold water up there and i was like well you know i can try and i can learn when we got done digging it of course it looked like a gravel bed that didn't even resemble a pond other than it had a hole in the ground and so we started looking around we had a person that was nice enough that was getting rid of their chicken pads which chicken pads for the chicken houses those big long chicken houses are built up with red clay we were able to go in there dig up all that red clay and have it transported in by dump trucks and then we spread it out with a dozer we spread over eight inches deep of red clay through this entire area i thought that would be problem solved it would just start holding water instantly that's what i was hoping for at least i even got in there with the truck contractor and four wheeler and just tried to compact it as much as i could well it didn't work it rained a ton it filled up to like five or six feet and within 24 hours was down to nothing but a mud puddle if even that and the bottom so what did i do i packed it more i kept packing and packing it would rain again and it would hold for a day longer then it would just all just go right through so if you guys remember i did a bucket test where i drilled holes in the bottom of a bucket i put eight inches of red clay in it and i packed it and i packed it and i packed it and packed it in that bucket until i packed it as much as i could put water in it and it held great it wasn't even leaking out the bottom even though the bottom was primarily just pretty much open and so i knew at that point it could hold if i packed the soil so i rented one of those vibrating rollers that had the sheep's foot is what they call it on it and i rolled for an entire day or day and a half whatever it was up and down sideways back and forth and i packed it as much as i could in that time that i had it rain started coming in it started holding and it started holding and started holding more now we're in an area in southwest missouri this area has just got a lot of humidity and so our evaporation rate around here is pretty high so it would start evaporating out and so i was kind of getting discouraged is it seeping out is it evaporating out couldn't really tell but it was always holding higher and higher well i didn't want to put in pigs or anything like that a lot of people suggested that a lot of people are wondering at that point why was i not putting fish in and building fish habitat it was because i wanted to make sure the pond would hold before i did any of that otherwise i'd have to drain it and redo a lot of stuff i will say i did have to drain it one time we did have the red clay in it before i got the vibrating roller i did buy a pump and i drained it out completely worked it with my tractor moved some of the dirt then i rolled it but um it kept it always kept holding higher and higher as you can probably tell you can see ducks going in and out behind me i did purchase some ducks from a catalog i got some mallards and then i just recently got some khakis hatched them out put them on the pond they dabble around the edges they'll dab on the bottom when they can they work the soil they're putting poop in the water and so it's putting material in there that is helping seal as well so the ducks are doing their job and i'll tell you i'm super happy with the outcome right now it's holding five to six feet in the deepest and it's always holding about that area when it does rain big enough that we have drainage going into it it holds higher and higher on average after that which is super exciting i have gone in since there's areas that i dumped a lot of rocks and old cinder blocks and stuff debris i did multiple piles of that throughout the entire pond for fish habitat we've now got grass growing up on the side even grass growing up into the water as the water keeps rising it's getting above that grass level which is pretty nice so i built and put elaborate duck house on it so the ducks have somewhere to go and be safe it's maybe a little bit over the top it's even got a light at night that with the solar panel turns on they don't care but i did start looking into getting fish to stock the pond by the time i was going to put the fish in it i was going to do a largemouth bass with a bluegill sunfish red ear and minnow mix it was going to be about 1 500 bucks and i did not want to spend that so what did i do i started hitting up some of our local ponds and stuff and started fishing and started putting fish over now i want to build it correctly i don't want to put a lot of large fish in there that they don't have the infrastructure of the food chain to live off of so i wanted everything to be down there in like that minnow fry kind of smaller stage i've put in now about four to five hundred minnows in there we do have uh about 200 small bluegill i'm talking most of them are an inch to you know two inch or so and those will grow pretty rapidly we do have a few red ear in here and then i was able to catch about 20 largemouth that were anywhere from you know six eight inches or under that are in here as well so i do think i have plenty of food in there i'm gonna get some more minnows and put them in there started building some fish habitat gonna do a lot more fish habitat one thing that's really exciting now that i just got finished here in the last few weeks is actually tomorrow or the next day they're going to be putting guttering on the house i've gone through and i have buried pipe coming from those gutters that all run into the pond so every bit of the runoff that is coming off the roof of my house will be pumped right into the pond because there's not a whole lot of runoff that it catches here it catches my yard it catches some of this food plot and we've even done a ditch on the back side of this food plot to try to catch the runoff there but it's so rocky and porous here that it soaks in and it just runs through the soil super fast so it has to be a torrential torrential torrential flood for it to really capture that water in there so all this runoff from the house is really really going to help and i am excited about that as you can tell also it is a bluer color i did dye it it does nothing to harm the fish it doesn't harm the pond in any way shape or form it just makes it look a lot nicer it's always had that brown tent like their suspended soil in there and it never ever settled out and so went ahead and did this and it looks really nice it's sitting here from the house it's almost like one of those ponds or lakes that you'd see way up high in the mountains so i am super happy with the pond i'm gonna continue to update you guys uh on the pond especially as we get the guttering down and see how fast it flows into this pond because it's gonna shoot out of there um and we'll see what level we get the pond up to we're going to still do some fish habitat what we're really focusing in on now is now that we've got it established now we've got it holding water let's build the fish habitat so dad and i can start getting there fishing we've started to get fish in there already so you can see that there is a feeder behind me that's primarily for the ducks just to kind of keep them here deer use it doves use it squirrels use it everything uses it but it's to keep the ducks here for now until they decide this fall if they want to fly south or not and hopefully they want to stay here because they've got a good food source they've got good protection and they like it right here in the front of my house so there you guys go i hope you guys enjoyed this pond update it's looking so good i can't wait till the next pond update guys make sure you subscribe to our channel because we're releasing not only pond videos but wildlife land management videos and deer hunting videos and turkey videos and everything every single week 300 and days a year not every day of the year but pretty dang close it feels like so there's a lot of videos go check them out subscribe comment down below make sure you enter to win our deer hunt giveaway that we got going on right now and guys until next time have a better than average day [Music] you

Channel: Huntin Grounds

Views: 282,847

Rating: 4.8931403 out of 5

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Id: cZFk3VA2cMI

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020