Here's how I Messed up...Farm Pond Basics most don't know!

folks today on the stoney ridge farm we're going to take you and we're going to show you what it takes to have an awesome farm pond on your property be it a farm pond or just be it a beautiful pond on your property we're going to teach you what you need to know to keep up the pond and some food for thought if you're building a pond on your property let's have some fun free to work i ain't afraid to play i ain't afraid to get the job done [Music] hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer welcome back to another gorgeous morning here on the stoney ridge farm we're in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains and this video is brought to you by popular demand i'm on 150 acre first generation regenerative farm and we have several farm ponds and folks have been asking josh how did the farm ponds come about what do you need to do for maintenance and if i want to build a pond on my property what do i need to do what are the processes what kind of work needs to go into owning a pond like this one right here that you see behind me and the other two that we have on the farm so today we're gonna visit five different ponds here on my property and on my neighbor's property and we're gonna give you some good food for thought in case you want to build a pond on your property which i know you do everybody does pond is just beautiful brings a lot of value to your home [Music] all right folks welcome to the stoney ridge if this is your first time here your 50 millionth time please hit that like button consider subscribing to the channel all around us is 150 acres of first generation regenerative farm it's a beautiful place and we take you and show you things that are going on here on the farm as well as other little projects that i have so today's project is talking about this farm pond back here behind me and the other farm ponds that we built on the uh property here so i have two ponds that i built on the property and this pond was here when we bought the property however it was overgrown and it was an absolute disaster so for the first two years of owning this property one of my main goals was to get this pond back into shape and i learned a ton of information while i was doing that one of the most simple things that i learned was using pond dye and i will post a link to pond dye there is a certain type of dye a coloring that you can put in the pond that will really really enhance the pond and bring the health of the ecosystem up so i guess the first thing we'll talk about is building a pond so the pond that's right over beside me to the right and we'll go visit each one of these ponds here very soon the pond over here to the right side of me we built here on the farm i have about 2 500 in that pond that's nothing it's about three quarters of an acre and it has enough water to sustain my cows indefinitely so does this pond so does the other pond the other pond is about a half an acre but i had problems with the other pond and we're going to learn about soil types and what you need to look for when it comes to building your own pond on your own property so this pond right here was built in 1961 it's a big beautiful pond it's around 2 to 2.1 acres and you'll notice that it's not muddy it's not a mess and there are no cows out in this pond so here on the farm and then something you need to know if you have property and you're thinking of getting livestock is to fence out your waterways guys fence out your waterways and take care of your waterways take care of your ponds like this because if you let your animals get in there your cows and stuff like that and you've all seen it you've been driving down the road and you've seen cows in the creek cows wading belly deep in the pond and it destroys the ecosystem so first tip that i can give you is keep your animals out of your waterways on your property if you can if you don't have animals and you don't need to worry about this so this pond was covered in green slime you could not walk across the pond damn the dam is right over there you could not even walk across it you couldn't take a machete across it it was so thick so what we had to do was come in here and tear out all the trees we pushed them off with a caterpillar loader and we took an excavator and we dug out all the way around the pond and pulled these trees off one of the biggest enemies of any pond is trees on the pond dam itself so what will happen is a tree will grow up on the pond down the roots will penetrate deep into the dam and you think oh that's going to help hold that pond well inevitably that tree is going to die and what that's going to do it's going to die it's going to rot and it's going to leave you holes in your pond dam where those roots were so that was something that i really had to combat and we had to recompact this pond dam we actually had to take and put a new pipe in over here on the back side of it this pond's only about eight to twelve feet deep in the very center and you don't have to have a very deep pond in order to have a very beautiful pond there's some food for thought for you guys now let's talk about fish and habitat okay we're going to go visit my neighbor's pond here in just a minute and i'll show you some footage of that pond habitat is important do you want a pond that looks like a golf course or do you want a pond that supports an ecosystem and a habitat for fish plentiful fish so my pond down here beside me has a lot more fish in it than my neighbor's pond that doesn't have a lot of habitat and you can look around the outside edge here and tell that i don't get rid of the grasses that are out in the pond because i want habitat for my fish i also will take my christmas tree and i'll toss it up in the upper end of the pond so that that gives good habitat for the fish what happens with a christmas tree or brush and debris in this upper end right here is it sits down in the bottom of the pond and the fish are able to lay eggs and the baby fish can hide from the big fish because the big fish can't get in there where those tree limbs are so that provides habitat for fish to grow inside this pond i have what's called sterile grass carp and we put about 15 sterile grass carp per acre of pond water and the way you figure that out is you just go on the gis website and you measure out your pond there's plenty of drawing tools on google earth and on the gis website and what i've done is i've put about 32 fish in here and they're called sterile grass carp sterile grass carp will consume a ton of forage inside the pond and what that means is all that green slime it looks slimy but it wasn't slime it's called duckweed and it's a little tiny leaf that floats on the top of the water and those fish consumed all of those little tiny weeds and cleaned this pond up so we used a little bit of mother nature to help maintain the pond so i encourage you guys if you do get a pond start fresh if you have a pond on your property and you have lily problems or you have green slime problems or duckweed problems consider putting pawn dye in your pond which will help clarify the water and also that will help to clear up any algae or duckweed you can also put animals on your pond such as ducks or geese but i'll tell you they don't survive so if you put an animal out on your pond like ducks or geese like that you're going to find out that those animals are not going to survive for very long so what we did again we put about i'd say about 32 grass carp in here i'm not exactly sure the number i'll get you some footage of putting fish in these ponds right now and we also put catfish in the other two smaller ponds and i love catfish i don't know about you guys but it's nice to be able to go out hop off the front porch run down here catch a fish and have it for dinner that's what living's all about for me so the grass carp will help keep the grass down around the edges of the pond and if you go out here and you fish and you're reeling in and you catch grass and debris and pull it up if you're doing that on your pond currently then you need some grass carp sterile grass carp will not take over the pond will not ruin the ecosystem they do not reproduce and it's something that you guys need to know about so just a little bit of food for a thought there i also did a few things in these ponds to help feed the fish i went down the creek and i caught minnows and i caught crawfish and i put those in the pond especially the new ponds so the new ponds would have plenty of food for those catfish that i put in there these ponds support salamanders tadpoles fish turtles all sorts of stuff there is an awesome ecosystem not to mention all of the beneficial insects like dragonflies that come from having a pond another question that i get a lot about ponds well i've got a pond like this oh man i bet you got tons of mosquitoes if you have a healthy ecosystem in your pond you will not have mosquitoes guys so it's something to think about i know a lot of people are standoffish about building a pond close to their property because they're afraid they're going to have mosquitoes again you're building not only a pond and a place of beauty and a water source for your livestock you're also building something that's an ecosystem and everything starts as an ecosystem it starts in the soil it starts in the water here on the stoney ridge farm so let's take a little pond walk around this pond and i'll show you the differences in the ecosystem that i have here versus my neighbor's pond that doesn't have a lot of ecosystem but he doesn't have a lot of the problems that i have too because cattails bring certain types of critters and we'll walk around the pond here and we'll show you so you'll see a little bit of green slime floating around on top of the pond this is an annual thing okay so you can't fight mother nature but so much this is an annual thing and we get a little bit of algae that grows on the pond in the hot hot summer months you can't fight it you just deal with it and that's what we do we just deal with this so if you look at this pond you get a good close look here you'll notice i've got some rocks out in the pond this is ecosystem all of this grass is ecosystem all of this cattail area will walk over here to the cattails this is an ecosystem too guys now you won't see a lot of cattails in my neighbor's pond that we're getting ready to go visit because he's eliminated the cattails what happens is all of these aquatic plants right here have a bulb associated with them and what will happen we've got a few muskrats that like to live up in this upper area of the pond and they will pull up these bulbs and they'll eat them that's how you tell if you have muskrats if you look out in your pond you'll see floating pieces of debris from the cattails that the muskrats are pulling up now muskrats can be healthy for a pond and they can be a hindrance for a pond they can go in under your pond dam and they can disturb the pond damn they'll dig back into the pond damn they'll dig back into here they're not digging in my pond dam and i'm not very very concerned right now but they are digging back here this pond backs up underneath the road and there is a swampy area on the other side and the muskrats go back and forth in between but they are nesting right up in here so it's 2022 right now this pond was built in late 2019. again i have 2 500 in this pond isn't it gorgeous i mean the house is right up there on the top of the hill the pond is right here but something you need to know about when you build a pond is you need to have the proper soil and you need to have somebody that knows what the heck they're doing when they build the pond perfect example of not knowing what the heck you're doing is the upper pond and i had a huge leak in it and i just did a video about repairing that leak so this pond right here has a very very healthy ecosystem also you can see the grasses are growing up around it i put riprap rock on the dam and you'll see my neighbor's pond has a lot of riprap this really helped keep the pond dam where it's at and keep dirt from falling off over in here when you first build a new pond now you'll see a little bit of green slime on this pond also it's just algae from the hottest time of the year guys and it's something that's absolutely normal now this pond has something a little different than the other ponds and i can see some fish right there right there is a little crappy bed either crappie or bass and this pond has catfish in it i just saw one come up tons of frogs tons of uh life in this pond just tons of activity all the time and this pond is about 14 feet deep right in the middle you can see the pond dam right here i leave the grass alone as best i possibly can on the pond dam but i don't allow trees to grow let's show you how the pipe system works on this pond versus the other pond that has a stand pipe take a look at this pipe system where there's a lot of fish swimming around there that is awesome some fish i didn't even put in there so there's a pipe right here and this pond has a flow it comes from a spring it's spring fed and it runs at about three gallons per minute that pipe goes through the dam comes out right here on the other side and runs back down to the creek area so before i built this pond this was a swamp this was a swampy wet area on the farm and it was absolutely useless it was the ugliest place on the entire farm and now you guys can see it's just absolutely gorgeous so we talked about the through pipe in the pond that we have right here we've got a pipe that runs through the dam and the upper pond also now we have stand pipes in this pond so there's a stand pipe here from when the pond was first built back in 1961 and then when i cleared out and cleaned up around this pond we put another standpipe in guys so there's another standpipe right here you'll see that wipe pipe sticking up that pipe runs through the dam and comes out right here this pipe is easily disassembled in other words i can take that pipe and i can pull it apart and i can drop the level of the pond up to about two and a half to three feet there is a specific type of fitting on the top of this pipe and you can get a little close up i'll actually post a a picture of the type of fitting so water goes into that fitting it goes up into it and falls down when the water level rises what that does and you can see water marks on here when the water level rises it keeps trash from going down in the standpipe and if it goes up above the standpipe which it does sometimes it'll fall down in there that is not the scenario that we have with that standpipe and you'll see a piece of pipe in here this is what i used to use to water the cows there used to be a waterer right down there so not only were these ponds something beautiful a place to fish a place to get good food but they're also serving as irrigation and water for the farm so if i ever need to irrigate my pastures i've got this pond to do it i'm gonna go up and see my neighbor's pond all right this is my neighbor's cabin and we're heading down to his pond he's got two big beautiful ponds here on the property and you can see it's much more maintained than my ponds on my property cruise down here see that he has some riprap right here on his property he's got a couple docks out on his property but you can also see that he doesn't quite have the habitat that i have now this pond is only about an acre larger than the pond that i have down there that we were just at the one built in 1961 and you can see how nicely he's placed all these riprap stones so we have just one section of cattails right here and what i need to tell you is that he had a huge problem with muskrats and when he eliminated all the habitat he eliminated the muskrats so he does have turtles fish all sorts of aquatic life here in the pond however he does not have the amount of habitat that i have now this is his standpipe this standpipe is designed with a cover over top of it to keep debris out of it once in a while we'll get a flood and a turtle or something will get stuck on the top of that standpipe there's a backup system in place right here and the backup system on my pond on the other place it just flows over the dam the backup system here is a through pipe that goes through the dam and comes out on the other side right here so if the water ever gets up this is an 18 inch corrugated double walled pipe that will help drain this pond you can see the ecosystem is totally different up here in his ponds my neighbor treats his ponds about two times a year with a little bit of pond dam and he puts about five grass carp per year in his pond what you need to know about grass carp is that grass carp thrive in a pond with a lot of water what happens is the bigger the fatter they get the less they eat so you've got to keep putting them in year after year after year and as you can tell it's really worked to make his pond absolutely gorgeous all he does he keeps the weeds down on the outside of the pond he just keeps it mowed and weed whacked and he keeps those grass carp in here and he puts a lot of grass carved so that they keep this water absolutely gorgeous and clean putting the aqua blue pond dye in here also helps to keep this pond nice and clean and this pond is probably about 24 to 25 feet deep in the very center beautiful beautiful place you can see the dam how well constructed it is when my neighbor bought this property this was covered with trees also it was overgrown and you could not walk around this property so there's a lot of neglected property and a lot of neglected ponds out there you guys can really find a value in that it is better to buy property with the pond than it is to build upon on your property now last but not least i'm going to take you up i'm going to show you how i messed up on my small air pond on the top of the hill in the stony ridge this is the pond that i messed up and there's still a lot of water in this pond this is about 12 feet deep in the center right here the pond level dropped so we had a seriously dry year this year and the pond level dropped this is a spring fed pond also but it only gets about two gallons per minute so it's filling up slowly from the pond repairs that i did i put a product in here called dam it damn it is a sealer that you put in the water and it attaches itself to soil and seals off any leaks where i messed up was this soil was very rocky okay so it had lots of large rocks in it and there are a couple large rocks right up underneath here where i just put this dirt and those large rocks are allowing for a pathway for water to pass through the dam so lesson learned make sure you have the appropriate type of soil don't put sticks and rocks in your pond down because they will not hold this is not damning up the creek in the third grade i'll tell you that so this pond right here serves several purposes um there was an irrigation pipe set in this pond to keep the cows watered at one point we drilled a well and now we don't have to do that you'll see a lot of habitat in here and you see the water is almost a black color right here there are catfish in this pond this solely has catfish that's all it has in it and we have tons of habitat as the water level continues to rise a lot of this grass will start taking over and what we'll have to do is we'll put our grass carp in here if we have any trouble with lilies or anything like that that's when we will instill the pond dye that dye helps light escape and go down into the pond and helps to eliminate any sort of algae problem that you might have in your pond i had no idea about this stuff before i moved to the country and before i bought my property and built a few ponds guys so hopefully this little ride around this little pond lesson has helped you guys we'll get you some awesome footage of building that pond down by the house i guess in 2019 i think you'll really like that this is just an absolutely beautiful place guys but there's work that you have to do if you have a farm pond and i want you guys to be well informed if you build a pond if you buy a pond or if you have a place that has a disaster of a pond like this there are all sorts of solutions to help you have a beautiful property and some great ponds on your property a great ecosystem for wildlife the deer come up here and drink turkeys come up here and drink all sorts of wildlife always around this pond right here and there's gorgeous catfish and frogs all around the bank so awesome guys well thank you all so much for joining me here on the stoney ridge farm i know i talked for about 10 or 12 minutes there about ponds but i think there's a lot more information out there i'll post some links to the die that i use in the pond and i'll also post a link to where you guys can pick up fish if you decide you want fish in your pond i think it's called arkansas pond stockers i'll post a link to their website so you can find out when they're in your area they travel the country and they stop in and sell fish at various little hardware stores pretty cool guys thanks a lot we'll see you next time on the stony ridge please pound that like button consider subscribing to the channel i'd love to have you back here on the farm with me take care [Music] a love you i had to spit it was nasty i had some nasty stuff i woke up and said nasty so i'm so nasty up in my mouth [Music] lemon face oh lion face

Channel: Stoney Ridge Farmer

Views: 156,793

Keywords: chickens, homesteading, farming, tractor, trucks, stoney ridge farm, stoney ridge farmer, ranching, farming channels, homesteading channels, farming youtube channels, cattle, tool review, diy, how to, pond, koi pond, fish, fish pond, koi, how to build a pond, excavator, backyard pond, fishing, diy pond build, pond construction, landscaping, ponds, letsdig18, lake, building a pond, farm pond, bass fishing, pond maintenance, farm pond cleaning, farm pond maintenance, farm pond build

Id: ZIh0dhGBvQs

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022