Building a 9'x25' pond
- Thread starter mrunlucky07
- Start date
Just spent maybe an hour of my night looking thru all this... time well spent! i have the PERFECT animal for your pond... my snapping turtle would love it. sometime in the future maybe need to attempt making a pond this amazing.
So awesome. Very clean work with lots of different aspects to checkout/tinker with. Can't even describe how jealous I am. If my wife and dog didn't like having a back yard, I would love to have a fully decked in year with several ponds like this.
I think one of the main points of this and other threads on here is that you can have one. You just need to build up the finances and will power to build one for yourself.
Hey Yan...You Know me...I do check in, but not have had a chance to check up on the current builds. If there are any specific questions PM's will pop up in my mailbox. Thanks for the continued interest and nice words. I am proud of the pond and do appreciate it. As you know hobbies can become consuming. I moved a bit from the pond to reef keeping (still going) and about the same time took up sailing. This summer we have been living on our sailboat and only home at most 2 days per week (I Love being a teacher) and the pond has self maintained perfectly. I still do have some update plans for for the bar/trickle filter area and adding two more plant filter falls along the fence between the turtles and the fence. maybe next summer???
Unfortunately nothing new this year or last. I have not added a single koi for at least 2 years, but fortunately I have not lost one either. All of the petsmart feeder goldies are around 10" and stay at the shallow end, the koi mostly at the other until someone comes by. Since no one was around to feed them this summer they have not grown a whole lot, but are healthy and trim vs last summer's fatties. The plants in both ponds have grown out of control and amaze me by their growth. I did add a channel cat that is now about 16" that is fun and feeds from the surface, I convince all the kids its a shark. All I need is Yannabrox to import me a sturgeon to be complete
The turtles are turtling, surprisingly we spend more time watching them since they are year round attention hogs. All are doing well. The 3 large sliders are all female and 5 now...I think. One diamondback is 3yrs and three are 2yrs...all female, and a 2 year old male RES and 3 year old male painted. All were raised since hatchlings eat from your hand. We have about a dozen bluegill with them that are growing quickly. I went back to work this week and filled up their 200gal in my class since I know the kids will be asking about them the first day of school. I think I will take everyone indoors for at least one more winter.
I would like to have given an update with some nice pics and hopefully will get a chance before fall, but didn't take any this summer and Irene passed directly over us last weekend. We were about 100 miles up the chesapeake sailing and had to high tail it back to rush prep everything for the storm which was a large job. I pulled all the plants and logs from the turtle pond so they could not escape and now its now a mess. Cleaning today I drained buckets of leaf particles from the settling tank on the koi pond even though I netted it just for the storm. (Have to love a bottom drain---free vacuum service
) I did snap a couple during a lull in the storm.You can see the pond plants sitting next to the turtle pond and I had just finished cutting a tree that had fallen over/in it before it did any more damage. Chaos of course supervising.
In this one it looks like the aerator is still going so we had not lost power yet. I had removed the shade cloth that covers the pond and netted it instead, also removed the bartop over the shower filter. You can see how the bog filter plants are leaning into the main pond, they are taller than the 6' fence when not in a hurricane.
The storm was a hassle but could have been a lot worse. Now that I am back at work again I should have more time to catch up on whats been happening on the site and do some overdue maintenance vs just goofing off.
I agree. The decking was a bit expensive, but otherwise using diy filters the pond itself was about the same as setting up a large tank.
