We require food and water to survive. This article accompanies our podcast about how we addressed both of these two critical issues at once by constructing our fish pond at The Place.
If you build it, then stock it, you will have fish… or so the theory went
One of the deciding factors when we bought The Place was we needed somewhere that either had a fish pond already built, or that had a good place to put in a deep pond that wouldn’t freeze through in the winter.
We ended up buying land without an appropriate pond, but where one could be built at reasonable cost.
One of our goals in the first year was to get the pond in, and we pushed hard that summer to get the little lake as correctly build but as quickly as conceivable in the later summer that year (we bought the property in pre-summer)
The goal that we could get as much grass cover developing before winter to limit erosion and mud control purposes.
Erosion was indeed an issue because the pond has really steep walls, but over time we have been able to mitigate the situation. As of this article’s re-write in summer 2018, the biggest problem wall is mostly covered by clover.
The pond filled overnight… literally…
We had what we call in Missouri a “goose downer”, and the situation is best describe in this article, part two of this series.
Food on the Fin Part 2: Pond erosion control & fish/wildlife habitat
Not surprisingly, since there was a Part 2 of the story, there’s also a Part 1 to go with it. Check it out here:
Food on the Fin Part 1: Building a pond as a fresh food & water larder
Stocking worked… you can’t fish where there ain’t no fish!
We have fish, but we don’t fish the pond right now.
Last summer, Spice and her brother (who camped at the place) dropped a couple of lines in to see if anything bit. Not surprisingly, since we do have fish in there, the bait got hammered by our finny friends (since the water has never been fished, they literally had no wariness of lures.
We don’t want to fish the pond because it’s not there for our recreational fishing, it’s a food resource… we are, literally, stocking fresh fish to be used in case of emergency.
Give the podcast a listen!