Your Fishing Pond - THE DIRTY TRUTH!

[Music] hey guys welcome to the homestead so I'm out here today at my pond and I thought I'd give you some you know what I've learned on when it comes to pond maintenance and experience with our ponds we have two ponds on the homestead when we first moved here one was in great working order that's the one behind me and there was another one that had been kind of filled in because cattle had gotten there years before we moved here and kind of tread down the walls of the pond and kind of ruined the pond and that's up the hill a little ways and where our plan is to dig that one back out eventually at some point and then get it back to working order and put fish back in it this one has got plenty of fish in it lots of largemouth bass lots of bluegill some ready or sunfish and I want to give you how to run down on what we got here it's really muddy right now because of the rain we just had we had about three and a half inches of rain so the pond is really really muddy right now but that's why it's muddy so you'll see you can notice there's a lot of lily pads in there tiny little lily pads and some some some water grass under what you call not really lily pads or smaller than that I'm not sure what the exact name is but we first looked on this homestead this was not here and about a year and a half ago maybe two years ago now I started to see the stuff growing up in the pond and I was like man what is up with that and because it was making art because you can fish in here and you know my son Josh would caught his first fish in this pond when we moved here really nice large mouth bass and it was making fishing very difficult in this pond and so because you're getting snagged on your line all the time when you're casting out not in the center there it's okay but when you try to reel it in man it just gets caught on all this grass here all that stuff so I went to the local Extension agent excuse me in town the Extension office most of you guys probably have an Extension Office where you live if you live in rural America and they provide a lot of great free information and I talked to the guys name was Darrell and he told me that you know having a pond and this I did not know it all having a pot is almost just as maintenance heavy as owning a pool a pool you know because Tim when he lived in Florida he actually had a pool at his house for a while and he would talk about how much work it was to have a pool as a lot of work involves a lot of maintenance involved with having a pool and if you have a pool you know what I'm talking about well the extension extension officer at the Extension office told me that owning a pond is almost a time-consuming and maintenance heavy as owning a pool it says because there's nothing you can do about these things they're going to grow eventually and you have trees see all these trees that grow along the bank well eventually those trees send their roots deep and they will actually ruin the sidewalls of the pond and allow the pond to leak out and so you have to keep this thing maintained by taking down those trees and you know dealing with every so often the grass that grows up in the pond these lily pads and stuff like that and I said well listen I got this stuff growing you know how do I take care of this and he said well there's a couple of options number one you can have you know backhoe come out and and dig it out and you know or you can read you the pond you can break the one of the walls of the pond and let it drain out which will be over on this side because there's the the top side of the pond is over here but the down side is over there so you can break one of those walls and drain the pond dig it all out and then start over well that cost a lot of money you got to rent a backhoe or hire somebody to do it and and then you basically start from scratch or you can have a backhoe come in here and try to scoop out as much as you possibly can again it requires a backhoe or you can use different chemicals they they have where you can put in here a little at a time and kill off all of these these lily pads I think there's a roundup a roundup chemical that I think it's made by roundup it's basically a salt that will kill these things so there's lots of options you know to deal with that I didn't want to use any chemicals obviously we're not into using a roundup for sure but another guy told me that you can use just plain rock salt and put it in little by little places every so often and it'll kill these things and that will allow you to have you know a place where you can cast out and then real lame without having any problems but you know eventually you can do the whole lake that way by putting that rock salt down but if you put too much rock salt in you can kill your fish so you got it sparingly and only in certain spots every so often so that was one way the other way we found maybe is to throw in a cattle panel with barbed wire attached to it and then rake out this stuff and pull the roots out now we did that over there and you can kind of see the little path seat a little opening right there where there's no lily pads we did that right there just as an experiment and it seemed to work I mean there's no lily pads right there we're very few in that one little spot that one little spot right there so we may do that along with some of the rock salt to open up this pond again basically you flip it out there with the barbed wire attached running around the cattle panel and then just drag it out and let rake out some of those those those lily pads there's a lot to do it means it is it's time-consuming it's maintenance heavy having a pond is is not just as easy as you know digging a pond and putting fish in there so it just it's kind of a pain in the butt and then if you do get one of these trees on the side that does spring a leak there's some kind of clay material you can use to plug the leak after you take the trees down and then also with the height of some of these trees around the pond right now if I cut some of them down they probably already have roots going through the side walls of this pond when those roots start to rot because I cut the tree down you may be asking for an opening to open up and water to leak out so it's it's kind of a mess but we're going to we're going to see once I get this track loader that we're going to be getting for the homestead we'll be taking a lot of these trees out and clearing out some of this and hopefully you know clearing out some of this as well so there's just a lot of issues with this pot now when we first moved here a lot of the fish that we caught had these little worms in the skin I don't know what the scientific name for these worms are but they were in the fins and in the gills and in some of the skin of the muscle tissue of the fish we were catching and I finally went to the Extension office about that and he told me what they were and he said there's lots of ways to get rid of those too put chemicals in everyone wants to use chemicals well I don't want to use chemicals so he told me the only way to get rid of those things and I'll try to find a picture of it and put it on the screen of these little worms that get into the fish it's a parasite and the parasite is exists because of a life cycle and there's a lot of farmers now I'm not one of them I'm not one of them just wanted to put point that out I'm not one of them but there's some farmers out there who will a time they see cranes or water birds some of these create water cranes and things like that land on their pond they will shoot them now these are protected species you're not allowed to do that but I know a lot of farmers who do it because they're part of that life cycle for those parasites and if a farmer wants to protect his pond and efficient it from getting these parasites you have to kill the birds the larvae exists in the throats of the birds and every time they come in and take a drink of that water for that pond they release the larvae from their neck into the water and then that larvae what it does it seeks out a snail in inside the pond there snails inside the mud of this pond and they will lodge themselves with the snails and then they'll grow some more and then from the snail they migrate to the fish and that's where they complete their life cycle and then from the fish it starts all over again back to the larvae that get into the water which the Pelican or the water crane drinks and the whole life cycle starts over again so they say the way you naturally fix that problem is to put in ready or sunfish ready or sunfish also called some shell crackers shell crackers and so read your sunfish will eat those snails at 20 column shell crackers and they'll break the life cycle of that that parasite that gets into the fish and so I think two years ago me and Tim went and we purchased about 50 shell crackers and put it into the pond and we haven't checked yet because it was about that time when all these lily pads started showing up and was making it really hard to fish so I'm really interested to get in here and fish at some point and see if the shell crackers took care of that Paris right that was getting into the fish so it's just again a pond is a lot of maintenance and it's just one of those things you know you don't know it until you do it you know I always thought you know having a pond would be something easy simple to have and and you just enjoy it by coming out and going fishing you have your own fishing pond and whatever you want to fish you come down here fish and it'd be something great for the kids to do little did I know how much maintenance is actually involved in a pond and it's something for you to keep in mind if you get a pond on your property or if you're interested in at some point building a pond it's not as simple as filling it with water filling it with fish and enjoying it for a lifetime of fishing it's something that does require maintenance it's time-consuming and like the Extension agent said I don't know if it's as much work as a pool but there is maintenance that is required for these palms anyway a little bit of information I thought I'd give you and hope you hope you get something out of it because you know I'm just trying to share the information I'm learning here on the homestead and sharing it with you guys so it is what it is it's just it's just one of these things on on having a homestead and dealing with the issues that come up so anyway I hope you enjoyed the video if you enjoyed the video please check out this list of amazing folks these are patrons they make all of our videos possible for more information you can go to patreon.com/scishow without our patrons so really appreciate you guys thank you so much all right guys check out the videos on the left hit that subscribe button down there alright see you next time on the homestead [Music] you

Channel: An American Homestead

Views: 157,402

Rating: 4.8428464 out of 5

Keywords: pond management, proper management of ponds, pond structure, water quality, cooperative extension, extension office, liming ponds, fishing ponds, fish stocking, pond parasites, homestead, homestead living, off grid living, homesteading, off grid, off grid cabin, homestead kids, homesteading for beginners, homesteading documentary, homestead rescue, discovery channel, diy, how to build a garden, off grid tiny house

Id: SUVxlZ8ZeaI

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2017