JD Garden Tractor Final Grades Backyard Pond Build Episode 5

this summer we are digging our own swimming pond in the backyard it started months ago by drawing up plans of what we had always dreamed about followed by the tough decision to clear a couple trees to make room for it all then I started digging by first stripping off all the topsoil with my backhoe and I saved it up in this great big huge pile here for later next came more heavy equipment we dug the hole with a bulldozer a midi excavator and my backhoe and we trucked it all off site with my two dump trucks so now as I like to say we're all done but finishing meaning the hole is dug but I still have a lot of finish work to do in order to be ready for the concrete sidewalk that we're going to put around the entire perimeter of this Pond for example I need to dig out another drainage tile that's in the bank smooth up the banks final grade the top cut in a rock ledge to hold rock around the whole top and then install my overflow pipe plus you had a few questions that I need to answer right off the bat here so I hope you'll stick around [Music] so this is a great geological study there's blue clay there's a rock that looks probably like a deposit you know like a glacial deposit here's a little layer of sand right here this is pure sand out of nowhere and that's yeah it's wet yeah so that so there's water moving laterally in the and then down here you got water coming in seeping through the ground and then below that over here blue clay look at this blue clay it's different than the brown clay oh look at that so interesting the difference is this stuff here is super wet look at this layer that shows the blue over here where she's wet it's like rubbery yes it is it's super easy to dig but this stuff turns to like concrete so this is all just glacial till down here see this blue smack over here man it's like real rubbery not all of it but so there is a wide variety of soil types and textures as you dig through the profile in this area the clay layers that we have here have low permeability meaning that they don't let water through them very well small sand and gravel Pockets that you do discover are highly permeable and they tend to be a collection point for the moisture and water that does make it through the clay layers it just collects air and can't get out that's why you'll find these pockets of water even at shallow depths they're trapped inside the clay but as long as you don't have a big vein of sand or gravel that goes all the way through your pond area and it doesn't stop then the clay that's around it especially when compacted and smeared smooth it'll generally hold water really well I actually had some concerns about the bottom most layer that I uncovered as I got to the the Deep part of the pond and I'm going to show you what I did to hopefully help that situation later on in the video I messed up the audio from this shot but the reason I filmed it was an attempt to illustrate the overall depth here it's hard to see it on camera sometimes but the Dozer is about nine feet tall and I had the hole in the bottom of the pond about two feet below the cab roof so my goal was to have at least 10 feet of water at the deepest point now remember I'm not worried about raising any fish in this Pond and I'll have more info in upcoming videos on how we plan to keep the water clean and fit for swimming so more on that later in the last video I asked viewers to guess how many total loads we trucked out of the pond well the GMC General had a flat tire on the biggest dig day but over the course of the entire project we hauled 28 loads out with it now the F750 it was a champ and it worked the entire time without fail and we hold a total of 38 loads out with it so the grand total of both trucks was 66 loads I'm not sure who had the best guess but thanks for playing along in the comments I really appreciate all the comments remember though that doesn't count the top soil that's still here so the total number of truckloads for the whole project is probably closer to 80 or 85 so so now with a few questions answered it's time to get back to the finishing work some of you noticed little pieces of plastic drainage tile or pipe falling into the truck in the last video and yes we chased that tile all the way across the pond I need to dig it back out of the bank and then backfill and compact the trench full of clay in order to prevent this from being a potential leaking point on the pond once the tile was dug back a sufficient distance I turned it up and I capped it off temporarily because I'm going to be using this later on as the outlet for my overflow pipe now I realize there are better ways to compact this trench but I'm doing the best I can with what I have available we've used the same method many times in the past and with the type of clay we have it always seems to work out just fine actually took a long time to pack this back in with a bucket and I pack it only five or six inches at a time so I'll continue to wheel pack it in with a backhoe on the bank and after I've packed it down with a bucket and the backhoe the cement truck will be here to be driving over this trench as well and it'll get a ton of traffic right over the area of the bank so I'm not worried about that leaking all right now it's time to pick back up where I did have some decent audio so we're back on what hopes to be another full day on the pond build I got some exciting news I talked to my concrete guy and he thinks he can show up this week which means I've got a lot of prep work to get done I've already been at it earlier this morning I went ahead and I checked right around the top and then I marked my my sidewalk Edge farther out three feet out I I measured and put some Flags down at three feet away from my concrete Mark that way I can start grading the top and get it close to on grade with the bulldozer first and now since I got the top and everything really close I'm going to go ahead and take everyone's favorite garden tractor around the top and get it smoothed up really nice so I can Mark out the sidewalk for the last time and then start cutting the banks down on the inside of the pond relative to Where the Sidewalk is going to be so we'll go test my Dozer skills again but first let's get Bruno out here [Music] okay well I have braided down the top with Bruno in the greater box they got a nice area for me to be able to go ahead and Mark out where the sidewalk is going to be for sure and what I had to do is Mark the inside of the bank I ran out of orange paint so there's green paint on a lot of it what I'll do is I'll come with the Dozer now on the inside of the bank and try to cut that down right at that inside Mark that'll give me a nice taper on the inside I gotta smooth up the inside Bank get it all kind of rolled to the bottom and Grate it out and then eventually I got to cut a Rock Ledge in it I'm going to try to do that with the Dozer too but let's see how this goes first see if I can get the sides all slicked down and and move to the bottom and then we'll move on from there [Music] all right I kind of got the top all cut down and the sides are cut down a little bit the last thing I need to do is cut in the Rock Ledge now this is something I never did too often Paul my boss when I was Excavating the person I learned from he's the one that usually cut down the rock ledge but I did it a little bit basically we're going to mark seven feet down from the top and if you try to dump rock on here right now it would just all fall to the bottom so you got to create a little bit of a ledge here so I'm going to take the Dozer blade and angle it in and gouge that out right there at the seven foot Mark and that'll make it so when the water comes up to the top it'll have a nice rock you know protrusion around the whole top that's the idea anyway once I get the Rock Ledge cut in and I'm done messing around generating dirt then I'll grade the bottom up try to get it all looking nice in the bottom and smooth it's almost too dry the dirt is really dried up and it's real crumbly it's going to make it real soupy when it gets wet but for the most part the base is all there it's just these crumbs on top are going to get wet all right it's looking pretty decent I got a few things I got to clean up in the corners these Corners are always hard to get with the Dozer so the Rock Ledge is going to come around here like this and terminate right at the beach so I need to dig this out a little bit Square it up the top is not perfect and The Rock Ledge isn't perfect but the nice thing is is with the concrete on top and The Rock coming up to it you can kinda but I'm going to try to use the excavator and dig out this corner here this corner down here was really tough with the Dozer because it's a really tight corner and it started to get pretty steep so that that one was tough but I like to leave a pretty good Ridge down there the other thing is I wound up cutting this out I marked it at seven but it wound up eight by the time I slid down the bank I was sliding pretty bad normally we go about six but I want it to be able to have rocks showing even when the water level gets down pretty low so I'm okay with it being deeper than normal because it's such a small pond that it won't really make that much of a difference in the amount of rock we need but the main thing is the bank is pretty consistent all the way around and like I said once the once the concrete's on top you'll be able to bring the rock up and make it you know have the right slope and meet the concrete all the way around it'll look good I hope all right I'll see if I can dip that out a little bit [Music] well another day has came and went I'm feeling good about the progress though I got the top all done and grated off we got the banks smoothed up I got the rock ledge cut in which was a huge accomplishment and something I was worried about only thing left is the Overflow and I got a cut out for the sidewalk between the garage approach and the patio area of the pond so one more day and I'll have it I'm going to call my concrete guy and tell him we're ready to go okay we'll see you on the next day all right back again on another night and one of the last things I got to do to finish up is get ready for concrete we're going to have sidewalk going from this garage patio area out to the patio around the pond so I got to get all this cut up I've got my buried internet cable ethernet cable that goes out to the shop I had to dig it up and find it manually but I found that now I've got to move all these paver stones and get that river rock out of there but concrete's coming soon so I'm going to get to that see if I can get the girls to help okay my concrete guy Jonas is here you leave the truck run so you're in a hurry huh is that your excuse to get going hungry all right well that was a big step to get that out of the way we've been wanting to meet with the concrete guy for a while and Jonas gave us some ideas on the concrete pier that we want to have that's going to be pricey but it's doable it's going to take a little extra effort I think it'll be fun to watch how that goes down so all right the only thing left I have to do is the Overflow and then I'll be all done with the finish and the next thing is concrete so on to another day which is right now so I'm not real sure how this is going to go I got the bet I got the dump truck down in here but I'm not sure how it's going to come out but I want to get this fluff picked up this stuff is just too fluffy [Music] okay I'm gonna see if this will come out of here [Music] and this would allow me to cover up that very spongy layer of gray clay you saw at the beginning and I just feel better about the bottom that way if I could put in some better dirt and then even with a quarter tank of fuel the truck ran out from sitting at such a steep angle the truck was completely dead and the concrete guys were waiting on me to get out of the way so I hooked up the Dozer to the truck pulled it out of the bottom with a chain and then I had to prime it up to get it running again I filled it up with fuel and hauled two more loads of the good stuff back into the bottom and then I proceeded to knock it all down and grade it out [Music] thank you oh boy well that's the first rain we've had here okay Kara says we gotta go it's been a lot of late nights and early mornings and well the only thing I have left to do is to put in this overflow and then we'll be onto concrete all right so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to build a little bit of an anti-seep we used to do this when I was digging ponds we'd dig a trench underneath the pipe and kind of form up around the pipe fill it full of Sac Crete and that is an attempt to try to keep it from leaking underneath the pipe so if water Creeps in under here it'll hit the concrete and then not be able to go past it underneath so we'll see I'll show you when I get this dug out go ahead and line it up with that green Mark make sure the end of it's lined up the green Mark all right so here's my little anti-seat trench that I dug out hopefully any water that comes in or tries to come in underneath the pipe we'll hit that concrete wall and not be able to seep through I'm going to make a little form out of dirt and go up over the pipe too go ahead and bring me like big chunks of dirt [Applause] so that'll draw moisture as soon as it gets wet that'll set up real nice we just got to kind of get it back filled so it doesn't disturb it real bad [Music] all right we've got our schedule 40 up to here I've dug down and found this tile that's running this way so I'm just gonna bring the schedule 40 down to it and hook you in and hopefully that'll provide our overflow okay we'll get this hooked up I'm gonna get a stick of pipe in there so I'm going to use an internal Flex coupler to go from the four inch schedule 40 to the flex perforated field drainage tile pipe I've cut the tabs off so it goes inside the schedule 40 real nice it's a real snug fit I'll tape that on and then this side will click into the perforated Flex tile and be a good fit a little glue on there oh so now all I've got left is to put a little Stone on my backflow pipe and then we'll have that all done and I'll be I'll be all done with the all done but finish all right well the overflows in that's all I really had to do to finish up my side of things I guess now we're ready for concrete they're already here started but I'm gonna wait to show you that next week thanks so much for clicking on this video I hope that you liked it there's a lot more cool stuff to come I'm looking at it right now and if I'm lucky I'll see you here next week thanks so much [Applause] getting hooked on these sunflower seeds when there's a project like this just kind of gives you something to do while you're running you know

Channel: Neil Koch: Dig-Drive-DIY

Views: 101,309

Keywords: digging a pond, diy pond build, pond with sidewalk, pond walkway, really nice ponds, building a pond, special ponds, nicest pond, pond with concrete, swimming pond, small backyard ponds, custom pond build, beautiful pond builds, hometown acres pond, letsdig18 pond building, letsdig18, best youtube ponds, easy pond builds, how to dig a pond, nice pond, cool ponds, the pond guy, pond instead of grass, pond instead of pool, pond vs pool, not your average pond

Id: JxqeLfsrbPM

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023