My goldfish pond

[CountryEscape]

Sounds perfect, Keith! And, while your crew is doing the demo/rebuild, your wife will be concentrating on that, and you can be planning your new pond. No need to design a pond until you have the yard, and can envision what it will look like in the spot you designate for it. My sister wanted me to design her a pond before they even found the house they were going to buy! Told her that was doing it all backwards, and I was right. LOL She thought telling me the size would be all that was important, but in the end, the size got changed, a bog was added, and she had a very large tree to deal with. I still worry about that tree, but that was her decision, against my better judgment. Time will tell if it survives or not.

 

[CometKeith]

Thanks jw, my hobbies are important to me. I guess I'm lucky that I have a lot of things i'm interested in. We are not moving unless there is a sufficient yard for the pond. Where we live now the houses are very close to each other. We are less then 10 ft away from the house on each side now. We are thinking of moving a little further from the city where land is cheaper. All in we are hoping to have a property about half the value of what we have now to reduce our debt and lower our expenses. CE, I agree completely. When we do rehab work we are always looking for ways to turn lemons in lemonade! The geographical characteristics of the yard including it's topography and quantity and type of trees/shrubs etc should strongly influence how the pond is designed and built. I would love to have one of those ponds you could look out the window and see the fish. Can you see your fish from inside your house? Oh I have an idea not that my wife would go for it.....Could you build a stream from your pond that runs through your house? That would be cool to have my pond fish swimming through my house!!

 

[addy1]

love the idea of a stream in the house! with our slope we can see the fish out of our windows. But also cause our slope is such a slope the pond is not right next to the house. We love the way it worked out.

 

[j.w]

Here's a couple but you would really need to control that humidity somehow and I'm sure it would be out of a lot of our price ranges to do this unless you are a really good designer!

 

[CountryEscape]

Yep, having your whole pond inside the house would be neat, but I suspect a LOT of humidity would go with it. In the winter time, it would. be awesome but the summer would suck. My 2 aquariums keep me from having the need for humidifier in the winter. They are just under the air return vent, so maybe that helps circulate the moisture throughout the house. Dehumidifier is now on again in the basement.
To have a pond/stream that is both inside and outside would be probably impossible. You wouldn't want bugs and critters having access to your house! Or, maybe you just meant having a stream inside the house. I like water, but pretty sure I would not want that kind of extra moisture in my house. Just saying ....
We will all love watching you build your new home and/or building new pond in the future, Keith! You know us other ponders ... never get tired of watching others work. I love all the new ideas I see along the way, too.

 

[CometKeith]

Addy, your pond came out fantastic. Did you ever picture that it would look this way when you first started building it? JW, cool pictures. I was thinking of maybe a square tube of plexiglass with a removable top for cleaning. The water level would need to stay below the lid so it didn't leak. CE, I wasn't really thinking about humidity but was more concerned about bugs getting in if it was unsealed but obviously open water connected to outside could cause a lot of problems. They can make almost anything out of plexiglass these days so I'm sure it can be done. I guess it could be glass also. I'm sure one of the shower door people I know would be happy to make it! It would be cool to have a feeding tube at one end inside the house so you could lure them inside!

 

[addy1]

Not really Keith, my hubby had me make him a drawing, so I did, which is sort of similar to how it ended up. The pond ended up where it is because that was the flattest spot I could find, then once we found the septic tank and lines, they also sort of guided where the pond ended up.
The shape, one end I ran into a rock bank, my little tractor could not break through (and the septic line was there) so the pond stopped there, also I did not want to damage the apple tree roots. The down slope side I left enough room to build a 10 foot wall for the bog retaining wall, and have room to drive through between the pond and the maple tree. The east end ended up stopping........I was tired of digging lol and also so I could go up the yard on the mower.
Then my dear hubby found two stock tanks, two preforms to add to the pond, so it ended up longer and with more ponds in the loop. Then hubby said lets build a deck pond to flow into the stream, so we did...................NO MORE lol

my drawing

 

[CometKeith]

Addy, I think that is really interesting how your pond was designed. It seems like you had to make a lot of decisions along the way to keep the plan going. Obviously it looks great but to the average viewer they would just assume the final plan was exactly as you designed it in the beginning. I think in general people need to adapt their pond designs to their environment. It is not failure to make changes along the way whether you are building a pond or any other challenge you may undertake. I think genius is sometimes accepting unanticipated results and doing something interesting with it.

 

[addy1]

The hardest part of the build was working on a 25degree slope, it is even hard to walk straight up. The stream ended up having major switch backs with collecting pools, small ponds on the way down, (85 feet long) So it would retain water when off, ow it would just be white water on the way down.

 

[CometKeith]

Addy so you had to draw how the pond would look and give it to your hubby? Am i reading too much into this that he was worried it would be too big..... and then he later ended up finding stock tanks and preforms to make it larger? I am trying to take cues from you how to plan our new pond and get the wife on board once we find the right property. I think I am going in the right direction in that she accepts now we have to move further from the city and not toward it to get a piece of land large enough that would work for the new pond.

I got a few floaters over the weekend and threw them in but the temperature dropped almost 20 degrees between yesterday and today so I am not expecting them to grow just yet. It is not going to get out of the 50's for the next few days and then it is going to get hot! yeah!!! I plugged in my uv light today. Normally I plug it in right away but was thinking maybe its not good to kill all the single cell algae right away in the spring so I waited a little. I'm not sure if it makes a difference.

 

[addy1]

Addy so you had to draw how the pond would look and give it to your hubby? Am i reading too much into this that he was worried it would be too big..... and then he later ended up finding stock tanks and preforms to make it larger? I am trying to take cues from you how to plan our new pond and get the wife on board once we find the right property. I think I am going in the right direction in that she accepts now we have to move further from the city and not toward it to get a piece of land large enough that would work for the new pond.

laughing, nah he encouraged me to make it what ever size I wanted it to be, he just likes drawings.
I see in my mind what I am going to do, how to do it, where to dig, etc. He needs a plan. Which for him helped in how to run the buried pvc for future electric lines etc. So I drew around 6 of those and said it will be one of these. The one i posted was closest to how it turned out.

Once I built it he then started watching craigs list and picked me up stock tanks preforms to add to the ponds, his idea for the deck ponds. Even suggested I do another liner pond, I said no! lol, more than enough water flowing around.

It was his suggestion to do the switchback stream, so glad we did, with our slope it would have just roared down the hill, I much prefer the meandering it does on the way down, with multiple small ponds in the turns.

 

[CometKeith]

Well it finally warmed up here . It went from 51 degrees to 90 in 24 hours! It settled back to 65-70 which is fine by me. The fish were chasing each other last night. I think for a change I might have more females than males. Even some of my 2 year old baby fish were getting into the act! I doubt i'll have any fry though. Too many hungry mouths in the pond. It's interesting how these things balance out.

 

[j.w]

Hope now it stays warmed up for you. That is some big jump in temps!
A few of those little be'be's seem to survive by finding good hiding places in my plant roots or between the rocks and who knows where else. I know the fish eat almost all the eggs that are laid and prolly a lot of the teensy fry before they are considered safe size to live free tho. Good thing for us it all balances out or we would be in deep doo doo trying to deal w/ all the extras

 

[CometKeith]

Thanks jw. It was in the 80's today but then it is going to cool down for the next few days and even go back to the 50's by mid week. The problem is Lake Michigan got so cold this year with 97% of it covered with ice that it is still really cold. The lake temperature this weekend was 37.6 degrees. Even a little wisp of wind from the lake chills us because we are less than 5 miles from it. Re natural selection... All my fish this year are doing fine with the exception of one fish and one frog I found frozen when the pond thawed. I do have two deformed fish. One is a shubunkin missing part of it's tail but the rest of it looks fine. Did one of the frogs take a bite out of it? I am hoping the tail grows back. The other is a mostly black fish that has a bad back and swims funny. At first I thought it was a tadpole when i first saw it! i wanted to get rid of it last week and then my wife found out and mentioned I wasn't a great swimmer either. so back it went in the pond. I never have had the heart to weed out the unwanted ones and still have close to 20 babies from two years ago in with the rest of the adults.

 

[addy1]

I don't cull either, whatever lives lives.