We need food and water to survive. This post talks about how we addressed both issues at The Place with the construction of a pond.
This is part one of a two part series, plus a podcast. Be sure to check those out as well.
Looking for The Place
We spent years looking for acreages that 1) were big enough to build a survival retreat on that could support us; 2) were far enough away from population lines of drift, 3) were small enough to be manageable by two aging people and 4) that we could afford.
To be clear, by “afford” I mean pay for, up front, with the cash that we had been saving for years to buy a place. We don’t do debt, not even a little.
There were other things we were looking for, and one of those was that it had a location where we could build a pond specifically designed to keep fish alive.
Here in the midwest, rural acreages often have small “livestock ponds”. A livestock pond is generally a shallow (3-5 foot deep) small (1/2 acre or so) pond designed so that cattle can stand in them on blistering hot days to cool off, as well as for cattle to drink out of. This type of pond is great for raising cattle, but entirely useless for fish.
We needed a place with steep enough draws that we could make an 16 foot or greater deep pond (to give the fish plenty of room/resources to survive the winter freeze).
Knowing what we wanted
With this (and the other factors in mind) we finally decided on The Place in 2014. We purchased it in the spring of the year, and our first project was to get the pond in as quickly as possible.
If you’ve never built a pond in a draw, it can be quite intimidating. Here’s what the pond area looked like before we began:
The hillside that is now the southwest slope leading down to the pond
We are not contractors, and we don’t happen to own a dozer… but we do know somebody who does, and we contracted with him to bring over his Caterpiller D6H bulldozer and have at it.
Spice and her new buddy…
We decided to set the pond near the head of a steep ravine for several reasons.
A) The area allowed us to build a very deep pond without making it huge (we couldn’t afford huge).
B) The placement was just down the hill from where we were putting the cabin, allowing for easy access to the water.
C) The area above the pond has never been used for row cropping, so there is no chance of chemical run-off into the water
D) The contractor’s belief that the area was all hard clay that would hold water nicely
E) The drainage area is large for a pond that size, meaning that it will basically stay full year round with ANY kind of rain at all
Under Construction
After we decided on the placement, the contractor got to work:
A panorama of the contractor at work on the pond
We could see that the drainage area would challenge the pond during times of very wet weather, so we decided to way overbuild the dam, including a large drainage tube running through the dam and an oversized slow-water spillway, to insure the structure would not fail.
The contractor did hit one large glacial erratic rock, which he pushed aside up to an area by the side of the pond. He told us he put it there because he thought it would make a nice place for us to sit and have a lunch down by the waterside. We have since named it “Seeder’s Rock” (the story behind that will be in Part 2 of this feature) and it does make a nice place for a lunch.
We were getting a bit concerned because the dam was nearly finished, but the weather was deteriorating. The worry was that it would rain before the completion of the work, making a real mess of the project.
Our contractor “knew what o’clock it was”
Fortunately for us, we had hired a “small town” “go getter” contractor who worked late into the final night putting the finishing touches on the pond as the first drops of rain started to fall.
Our original plan was to go down into the pond bottom and place a bunch of hiding places for fish before it started to fill. Mother Nature would have none of that, though.
The contractor called me at 8:00 PM saying it was done and that it was raining now.
I drove down the next morning to see if any water had collected. The pond was full.
It was a bit of a muddy mess at the start…
We didn’t have fish yet, but we now had a good, clean source of water to use in our water purification systems.
The contractor was done, but the work on the pond was just about to begin. Stay tuned for Part 2 of Food on the Fin.