Pond construction begins

[keokoi]

KFG, I would look into the future as you progress and get more into it. I think after awhile when you get good at culling. you may want to release bigger koi later in your career as a koi farmer. Just my opinion. A deeper pond won't hurt that is for sure. Joe

[koifishgirl]

You may be right I can have the parent kois pond dug a lot deeper. That way if I want to grow some bigger I can. I plan on being very pickey about the koi I want to raise up to good size and I dont think I will be keeping that many. If one of my parent kois produce a lot of show quaily koi then I will go from their to what I need to grow them out to big koi.

[MikeM]

KFG: I was joking more than serious. I know you are going to do what you have planned. If just for growing to 6", then I'd think your depth is fine; but I'd rely on others with real experience raising fry to tosai as to optimal depth for that purpose. I think most of the creatures fry consume will be in the upper layers.

[ranskye]

yeah ive just worked out what your measurements are..
I dont get the 25 foot surface area though but anyway i can see what your doin there.

its good to see what your dealing with and doing. i musunderstood you before thinking you meant metres.
i dont know mikes take but also while 4 foot may be fine for fry and grow out, i prefer for fish ponds to be a bit deeper.

id be asking more why would prefer you go shallow. i know shallow ponds can grow fine, people say the light penetrates that depth better..no offence intended to you at all mike but i reckon theres more to it than light.
tell her to hide the keys of those dozers for a night itme joyride.

really if they are 4 foot at deepest then you will have them even more shallow at the other end and you have to have a freeboard.. they wont be fully full.
(you should get them to put a taper in and not leave them flat bottomed.)

i prefer ponds about 1.8 to 1.4m and not less.
shallow ponds= cool quick, warm quick. ie. they fluctuate more are less forgiving.
predators can eat them out easier also.
a farm next door to where i worked failed, one big reaon was cause the ponds got attacked by predator birds. it seemed they put as many ponds in as quick as they could, now theyre full of bottom growing weeds.
shallow ponds with slow sloping banks are even worse at a lot of long legged varieties can feast on your efforts.
dont let that panic you if theres not a lot around to eat them but it is a bad point of shallow ponds.
with deeper ones your getting more water for land area also.
for me shallow ponds limit the ability to breed and grow in a larger time window.
you can spend more on what land you do own and itll be ok.
pleas eremember how much more work many many ponds are, even though you get more control ove rpairings in theyre own pond you can expect them to provide less than the real shallow ones too.

if its gonna cost you more than you wnat5 it to, then you can keep going as is, itll still be ok.
though if they can scrape em deeper while yhey are there ,for not much more dollars, id do that.

id assume theyre going by the hour. tell em to chunk it up deeper to begin and manicure last.
this might be a time when its better to have 3 done right then get them in to redo once your up and running with water and fish on the property.

well anyway thats my advice.
anyone prefer 3 and 4 foot over five and six feet deep in regards to farming?

[ranskye]

haha, i thought you meant dig deeper in your pockets.
yeah she will do the four sixteens. we know our kfg.
anyway kfg your having a go an im not gonna stop you doing that. go for it.
dont let us freak you out. take a bit of notice and do only what you can.

mike, did we do a simultaneous post?
i had that exact theory on light penetration and depth for a while.
i remember seeing a cross section of light penetration and how life doesnt occupy real deep ponds, and life hangs in that zone, however i now think that a five or six foot pond produces more food than a four, i reckon that water and alga move and get exposed to light a bit more than a straight out drawing would suggest and also that nutrient availablity factor in and hence bloom ups are a bit more stable.
regardless of whether ive got a new theory thats right or not, i found the forgiving nature of a deeper pond helps in that its not just food that fish need to grow fast, theres a buffer for things like temp and o2 as well.

[ranskye]

steve might have a theory or preference??

[koifishgirl]

I am going by what a local fish farmer in my area in pond size and depth, He had his ponds dug like this a has less trouble with them, he does not have to use real big seine's to catch his fish. He has been selling fish bait for years. As far as surface area goes I wish I knew how to draw on a pc and I would show you what I am talking about. Let me see if I can explain this. Ok. Width at bottom is 12 foot and then the sides are to me like the ocean floor the slope is so grad. that you can walk into deep area easy. That is where the surface area comes into play. If I could draw of this darn pc. You would see what I am talking about but this may give you a good idea. Take a look at the pics and you will not notice much of a drop off as the way he has dug the pond it does not look like it is even four foot deep..

I will be netting all my ponds to keep birds out so I should not have a problem
there. I am going to measure the surface area today but I walked it off a 25 feet across

It will not have a deep end the whole pond will be at the 4 foot depth. All four sides will have a low slope and this is where my surface area is coming in. The pond will be bigger than the 12 x 50 because of the slope giving me a bigger pond. That size is just the basic floor length and width. After slope the sides I have a much larger pond. I may be wrong but with the extra surface area I thought it would be ok. The contractor tells me also to do it this way because if I do not then he said that the pond walls will start caveing in and and fill my pond up and then he would have to come back and redo or clean out my ponds.

[bekko]

Your contractor and the bait guy know the local soil and will probably give you better advice than we will. Looks like a 2:1 side slope. That would make them about 28 ft wide, more than half-again larger in volume than you led us to believe.

I wouldn't go deeper for fry ponds. You want to maintain good oxygen to the bottom and the deeper the pond, the more chance of stratification. In the winter you want to dry the bottom. You have no topography so I can see now that getting them completely dry probably isn't going to happen. However, the deeper you go, the harder it is to dry them. Besides you are going to be using electricity to pump them down.

I would still ask the guy to put a little slope on the bottom when he's doing the final grading - even if its only a couple of inches.

You are closer to the coast than I imagined.

-steve hopkins

[koifishgirl]

Ok. Steve I will. If I want to grow any koi to jumbo size I can put them in these big ponds. The two dogs are our pets Rain and Crisco German Shepard brothers, one year old.

[bekko]

Nice spread! Since there are geese, the aligators must be under control. Looks like a good spot for some large net pens.