In my back yard I have a small pond. The very outside edge is along the property line and for years now during heavy rains it will over flow into the neighbors yard. It doesn't bother him and it's been happening long since I moved here but I would like to fix it.
I also plan on fencing in the pond for cows in the next couple years so having solid ground between the pond and neighbor property will give me a place to set the fence. How should I go about this without draining the pond? I'm able to extend the pond into to my yard to lower the water level which id like to do anyway to make the pond bigger. Can I add fill dirt, rock, and/or gravel or will it just settle to the middle? I think if I start pouring in dirt it may just turn to mud if I don't lower the water line first. I have a mini excavator and dump trailer for the project.
If the pond is overflowing it will not help to make it bigger or deeper, if when it gets full it overflows that way. do you have a drainage ditch nearby. you could put and overflow on the inside of the pond that flows by gravity to the ditch. you could build up a dike on the side that drains to the neighbor, but if your yard slopes that way, it is an act of God. If you make changes and it flood his yard, you may be responsible. you may need some broken concrete to put along that edge to make it less likely to erode. if you have ducks, they will be constantly working the edge, and the pond get wider and longer, and silted in. I assume this is filled by rain and natural downhill flow. More info may help. how big is your property. how is the landscape/drainage in the yard? you do not have to drain it, but it will help you pack the new side if you fill it in. a combo of rock and soil with some clay/bentonite added in. You can also then pull the mud off the bottom to make it great. Even if it starts off like a pool, it will silt in and erode. sounds like fun. you could consider a liner if it is not too big and therefore cost prohibitive. Or may have to add the bentonite to reseal the ground so it holds water.
reread, and if the pond fills and water rolls into your neighbor's yard, it would prob. do that even if there was no pond. water follows level. In other words, if you filled in the pond level with the rest of your grade, it should still run to his yard.
doc, your wisdom and experience is highlighting my lack thereof... As it would happen, over the summer my family and I worked to clean up our wood lot where the previous owners had dumped several loads of broken concrete. We filled up a 14ft dump trailer 3 or 4 times and hauled it to a nearby gravel company to dispose of it. It was only $60/load but it's looking like I may end up buying it back from them for this project! On the plus side my trailer is currently loaded with small boulders and rock that I dug out for my barn foundation and I was trying to think of a strategic place to store it. Looks like the bottom of the pond wins it!
We do not have a drainage ditch and there really is no possible way to divert the water anywhere. You're right in your assumption of pond design, it's the lowest area of the yard and when whoever built it they built a 500ft drainage ditch across the hay field to fill it. Building this raised embankment on the pond perimeter is only going to divert the water elsewhere which I will need to be strategic about. The bigger purpose of building it is to allow for pasture fencing on the far side and to raise up about a 200ft section of property line where I can add some trees and grasses since my neighbors house is about 10ft from my property line.
If you are the lowest point of the basin, it's a difficult issue.
It's important to fix the drainage issue before fixing the property line. You should look at the topography and adjust the drainage of the pond, from any side, to go onto your property instead of theirs, using natural grade, channels, swales, ditches, etc. To do this, some part of your property needs to be a lower elevation than your neighbor's. You can adjust the ditches and runoff slopes to connect them and basically set the water level of your pond to the height of the "spillway" if it is equal grade or lower than your neighbor's property. Then, any and all overflow is controlled and routed on your property and eventually to the nearest drainage ditch.
Depending on the feeder ditch, you can the height of some part of it as the overflow drain, so when the pond is full, the feeder ditch runs backward and dumps elsewhere. Basically control the excess runoff before it gets to your pond.
In the past we found something like that was dependent on how the Army Core of Engineers had delineated the property wetland status. We almost bought a piece of land like that but once the Engineers sent a group in to delineate against the wetlands maps turned out we had to stay a couple hundred feet away from the designated wetland area with sitework so we walked away from it. The EPA does have different rules for farms though so best to have it checked out before taking a chance at huge fines with the crazy rules these days.
The neighbor is downhill so there is unfortunately no where else for the water to go. Since this is a man made pond that is filled from a swale I think I have two ways to fix this.
1. Make the pond bigger.
2. Make the trench smaller.
If the pond is bigger it may not overflow. I would like to make the pond bigger anyway to support different types of fish, but this is a delicate balance in swale to pond size. If the pond is too large, the pond may dry up during dry season and the other half of the equation is flooding the neighbor.
Erring on the side of too big a pond, I could possibly hook something up to a well I have nearby that could help increase the water level during droughts. There is an old hand dug well about 100ft from the pond. I could dig a trench to get power to it and run a pump from there to the pond. This seems a bit overkill though.
I had doubled the size of a fish and duck pond back in the day. It was beautiful, but when refilled, all the water went in the ground and the fish I had meticulously saved and put back in died.
If the pond is full and you get a big rain, it may still overflow and follow grade. If it is only half full, then yes, it will retain more runoff. Your neighbor is understanding and should be if this is natural runoff. If you try to change that and make matters worse in "his opinion" it can get legal. you then become responsible for the runoff so be careful. If you plan to have fish or wildlife or livestock depending on the pond, then the well is a good investment.
I would put rock on the back "wall" sides of the pond to hold soil. I would leave the bottom so it can be dredged out. How deep is it and how deep do you want it? The water and dredge from our pond went on the 50 x 300-foot garden. we had ducks and fish in the pond.
Have fun.
you could add a normally dry reservoir pond to let the overflow pipe drain into. you could build up the backsides of the current pond. this pond would remain empty except for the occurrence of a big rain that would otherwise overflow you pond. all done via underground pipe on the near side, with a riser pipe set to the max. height desired in the pond.
if you grade the pond like a pool with a deep end, in dry times there would water with a much smaller surface area keeping fish alive in the deep end. then the well could keep up better than a large pond with an equal depth bottom
I added a 14ft dump trailer full of large stone, basketball size and larger, to the back wall this morning. Surprisingly it held the weight of my 11k excavator so now I'm almost able to drive around it without going into the neighbors yard. One or two more loads of stone and I will be ready to cover with a few feet of dirt. This should make a nice elevated fence line for the cows and will look nice from the neighbors yard also.
The water height is about 2ft lower than the bank. It's been a dry month. Last year at this time it was up to the top of the bank. The overflow tube with dry pond is an interesting idea, but the water would have to move up hill. As far as pond depth or condition, I really have no idea. I've lived here only a year now. I know it's deep enough to support a healthy bass population. The pond is probably 100ftx100ft at most.
my pond was 30 x 60 and 6 feet deep. I had thrown in a dozed 25 cent goldfish and thought they had all died but had 55 foot or longer coi when I started to drain it.
yes, a dry pond will have to be lower than the top of the water level max you want in the old pond, and as much deeper than that as to the water you want it to hold. the excavated soil can go to the back of the pond. if it is long and wide, with min. slope, it can be mowed when not containing water. the bigger the surface area just like in your old pond, the more water per inch of depth it can hold.
water will always find level when not contained, just ask the romans. :) good start, and good luck. You might tell your neighbor your plan to help with run off, so if there is a problem in the future, he will know you are trying to help.
my apologies if I am stating things obvious to you. Doc
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You can see where I added the rock. The cattails and tall grass on the backside is water logged. It's possible building that to a mowable grade and digging out some of the perimeter of the pond may fix the problem altogether. I'll start with that for sake of simplicity.
If you have some clay type soil, that will help seal up the "dam" if you will. sorry you are not close, I would come help. these projects are fun.
When it comes to ponds I am a little touchy. Years ago on one of my farms had small pond, field crossing set up that had washed out on the ends. Had a neighbor that had a D7 Cat at the time. I used it and the scraper he had and really dug it out and made a nice dam we could drive any equipment over. Pond ended up being five acres under water. Its in a pasture so it made a nice way to water cows. I owned the farms on both sides so when if got completely full it would back up a little into the farm to the south. It was just drainage water off the pastures. These farms border a state game refuge so we get a lot of government folks around. Not for sure who dropped the dime on me. I think I know but it cost my a lot of time and a lot of lawyer fees to keep the pond. Now days I don't move any dirt with out getting the NCRS involved. I learned my lesson and it was costly.
Update:
The past week has brought a lot of rain. The pond level has raised by at least a foot. I would estimate that there is between 6-8" between the surface of the water and the bank of the pond. A couple more heavy rains and we are likely going to see the resuming of flooding next door. I talked to the neighbor about it yesterday and he just shrugged and said he doesn't think there is much we can do about it. It's good that he doesn't mind, but my goal is still to stop the overflowing and get it under control so I can fence in the outside for my cows.
Is expanding the pond into my yard a feasible solution for this problem? My mini excavator can dig between 10-11 foot down. I can safely dig probably 8ft deep and could extend the pond pretty much as far as I want into my yard. My hope is by increasing the holding capacity we can stop the overflow.
Did the land drain in the neighbor's direction before the pond was built? No matter how big you build the pond there is always going to be a bigger rain event to overflow it. If there is no way to re-direct the overflow; it would seem the natural drain would have been across the neighbor. If for some reason the pond dam caused the drainage to change, then I would be looking at altering how the pond drains rather than increasing its holding capacity. If the natural drain was always across the neighbor, you have no worries.
It sounds like there's no standpipe or spillway for the pond. Is that correct? Typically one or both would be part of the overall pond design and there wouldn't be indiscriminate overflow. A standpipe could theoretically be routed to control exactly where the water went and limit the maximum level of the pond.
I would try to see the limit of your pond. can you calculate the amount of water you would need to hold to keep it from flooding? could you just extend the dam longer along the property line (terrace), so it keeps the water on your side so it will go to the pond as the water recedes. It may make part of you land a marsh, depending on how often and for how long it is under water. this terrace would help keep the water on your side. Sounds like the grade slopes toward your good neighbor. the shape of a pond, like a bowl, allows a set amount of water to increase the depth less and less as it fills (more cross-sectional area). so, with a terrace on the downhill side, it will overflow to the yard, and then not raise as fast. Essentially, the water stays in the yard, until the pond has capacity. any rainfall starts at the level the pond is at and goes from there. so, a pond 100 feet deep and full will flood the same as a 4-foot deep one with the same topography at the surface.
Update:
We have had a little snow melt so far this season and most of the surface soil is saturated so I walked down to the pond this morning to take a look. As I suspected the pond is back to full capacity and slightly overflowing in a few directions. I called the soil and water department to see if they had any advice and they sent over some NRCS guide on pond building which I had seen before but I skimmed through it again. The department also told me there is about 25 acres of watershed heading toward the pond area which I calculated to be a little over 1 million gallons of watershed in a 15 year 24hour rain event. The soil in the area is moderately poorly drained and has a water table between 10 and 30 inches during the wet season. That said I am now convinced there is no stopping the watershed and it is not a pond problem, but more of a geographical problem.
The best plan I can come up with now is to increase the bank height slightly on the side of the pond where the pasture fence will be built but leaving a few foot wide low area on that side for watershed. The rain water is going into the neighbors yard one way or the other because that's just the lay of the land.
Youve got an excavator and a downhill neighbor. Convince him to hire you to build a pond on his side, and your dreaded runoff will become his joy. If his side has pasture potential maybe hed like to rent you some grazing rights in which case his pond would also serve you.