The ponds will be perfect for fish and the moat will be ideal for water lilies. Some fish are not compatible with water lilies and lotus, so I would plan on keeping them separate. You can put mosquito fish or minnows in the moat to control mosquito larva since they don't bother plants. If you use gold fish, be ready to do something to keep them from having a population explosion. That is a common problem with them.

My pond is similar to your 20 x 50 in size, but yours sounds much nicer. I use native minnows because I am mainly interested in fish to provide insect control. Your major challenge will be algae control: green water algae, string algae, and slime algae. Believe it or not, the only good one is slime algae. It is a sign of a healthy pond. One secret to algae control is lots of plants and not very many fish. I also use bales of barley straw to prevent algae. A good pond with lots of plants will be fairly trouble free. I never feed my minnows. It is like a terrarium with everything in balance.

The book I use on pond plants is:

Encyclopedia of Water Garden Plants by Greg & Sue Spreichert. It seem very complete.

Here is a link that might be useful: Good Pond FAQ

mjff,

First the serious side - GET EDUCATED ABOUT PONDS ! Sorry for yelling online but many have come on this website to speak of "not knowing what I wanted; left it for the ""expertise"" of the contractor; and regretted for ever..". Get a book (public library) on best practices of pond construction. Knowledge will get you what is best for your home's landscape / personal wants.

A project this size calls for you to think about how a natural water feature keeps its water clear (hint: plants plants and plants). Check out your fellow texan's website (Texas water Lilies).

Now the funny side...

Paragragh 1: "...a large (75,000-100,000 gallon) pond."

I guess it is true; they do things BIG in Texas.

Paragraph 2: "Also, we are very close (maybe 750') to a Great Blue Heron's nesting tree. Last year they successfully raised 5 young Herons!"

My suggestion: In the pond - Either make the depth 4 feet throughout, straight walls - no sloping, and shelter for your fish or...
Stock it with 10 cent feeder fish because that will be what you are doing THE WHOLE YEAR ROUND (especially around chick-feeding time).
{{gwi:190885}}

Good luck with it,

LP

You need more filtration. A turnover once every 6-8 hours is not enough.
You need a minimum of once every two hours and that is the minimum if you plan on fish.

I don't even know where to start on this one, so I'll just comment: That's one SHALLOW pond. With that plan I'd lean towards LOTS of plants and fish that don't reproduce very well or that will readily eat themselves. I'm guessing they'll have to be adaptable too since the pond's temperature will be quite unstable. Might be really good for victoria lilies and such, but what do I know.

Hi
Skip the pond and go for a water park Then you could chage admission lol gary

Thanks for the help. Is a 2 foot to 4 foot deep pond considered shallow or did bbriggs misread the figures as inches?

Let me see if I'm on the right track. If I restrict the Koi to the ponds and build them deep with steep sides the Herons should not be a problem, and the Koi won't be able to bother the plants. Also, that will reduce the area I have to worry about cleaning fish waste from.

I can load up on plants in the moat which will help to eliminate the waste from the fish as long as I don't overstock the fish, and the fish will produce fertilizer for the plants.

I'm still confused on the need to "turn the water" every 2 hours minimum. That is going to require a lot of electricity to move over 800 gpm. From what I've read if you have plants only the water doesn't need to be "turned" at all. That would lead me to believe that the number of turns required is probably related to the number of fish and plants you have.

If you have all fish and no plants you need to run the water through a biological filter at least every 2 hours, but with all plants you don't need to "turn" it at all. In my case the pond will probably have around 10-25% of the maximum # of Koi that it could have, so wouldn't that greatly reduce the amount of biological filtration and "turns" required?

Are there any plants, particularly floating ones to provide shade, that the Koi won't mess with?

The straight sides (sharp drop off) will help to deter the herons (they like shallows to walk around and "stalk" - like your moat...). Rhodyman said it right

"You can put mosquito fish or minnows in the moat to control mosquito larva since they don't bother plants".

Get creative with barriers between moat areas and pond areas to restrict larger (more expensive - Koi as an example) fish from your shallow areas and possible heron attacks (Question: you don't happen to have ospreys nesting nearby?). hee hee

The only water plant that I've heard that koi do not like to eat is water lettuce. There are others, but I'm not aware of them at present.

There will a lot of suggestions given here. Just remember you're working towards a balance of the environment in your pond. Get knowledgeable (pick up a book on the subject) about what it will take to achieve that.

In closing read the thread posted recently by azponder below. Enough said,

LP

Here is a link that might be useful: Lessons Learned: Dealing With Pond Contractors

Loma you beat me to it! I was going to point you to my thread. If you do some research you will see one mantra repeated everywhere and that is that the majority of ponds that people don't like, due to their high maintenance issues (algae, brown or stinky water, dead plants or fish etc) are almost always from problems that were created the day the pond was concieved. Everything from filtration, circulation, depth and what kind of plants and fish you want should all be decided before you even contact a contractor. Otherwise you may pay good money for a beautiful algae bowl.

Check out my thread about contractors so you don't go through what I did.
http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/ponds/msg0315504031349.html?26976

My contractor in the end built me a great pond. But ONLY because I got in their face daily when they tried to "improve" things. The guys could build structurally and aesthetically but had no clue about fish, plants, filtration or even that concrete will leech into pond water and kill fish.

Your post scares me a bit as it sounds like you are ready to pull the trigger and you don't yet even seem to know what you really want the pond to be for you.

Will you actually enjoy mucking around in there to trim back plants? If not, then you want to make sure you don't fill it with "high maintenance" plants that might look pretty but dump tons of leaves (and with their decomposition destroy your water purity).

Your pump is going to be way underpowered to adequately move enough water to power an adequate filtration system so Koi are out and maybe even goldfish. Unless you dedicate a ton of your pond to being a Bog filter (live plants acting as denitrifiers/oxygenators) and that will require some planning and experimentation with plants that will thrive before adding fish.

LP, actually we do have an Osprey that hangs out for a couple of weeks each winter. It fishes in the river with the herons, fascinating to watch it fish. The river is only about 400 feet from the house. There are no large trees near the house, so I'm hoping the osprey will stick with the river, since there are large trees it can fly to after a catch there.

Also, one of the primary purposes for the moat is to eliminate the need for a fence. Our house is in the middle of our pasture. I need something to keep the goats out of the yard, and a moat seems aesthetically more pleasing than a fence, which would intrude on our view of the river in back, and the 2 acre lake in front of our house.

Goats won't walk through mud if they can avoid it let alone standing water. We have livestock guard dogs (Great Pyrenees and Anatolian Shepherds), and they are not too approving of any large bird flying over the pasture or landing in an area they can get to. They will usually run underneath them until they exit the property. Some buzzards were trying to get at a placenta (it is kidding season right now) the other day, but had to go look for an easier meal because the LGD's wouldn't let them land long enough to eat. The herons and osprey will probably have the same problem.

During the summer I expect the dogs will swim in the pond, will that cause a problem?

Azponder, your points about contractors are well taken. I just spent 2 years building this house, and I do mean building it. I did most of the work myself or hired my own crews because I either couldn't find contractors or had to fire the ones I hired. By the time we finished I was beginning to wonder if I spoke some strange dialect of english that most contractors couldn't understand.

I have a very good idea of what I want from the pond, I'm just not entirely sure how to get there. As I've been doing more research it has become apparent that what is necessary/desirable for a small pond is not necessary or desirable for one as large as I am planning.

My contractor told me I wouldn't need any filtration, just to keep the water moving, and I'm gathering for the pond I envision he is probably correct. If you think about it, the pond I am building is the size of a lot of golf course lakes, and most of those I am familiar with are pretty clear without using any filters even though they have fish, turtles, frogs, etc.

Does anybody here have experience with a pond this large that could provide some feedback?

The pump size people are mentioning is for Koi or goldfish. I have an 18,000 gallon (17'x 47'x 2-4Â) lily pond garden. With my minnows I don't have any pump. I have lots of plants and have a spring feeding the pond. It fills from spring water in less than 2 days.

In your case I would run filtered moat water into the ponds. That way your pump would be rated to "changes" of water in the ponds, not the moat & ponds. Then the overflow from the ponds would go back into the moat. If you don't raise Koi or goldfish, then the pump can be much smaller, just big enough to keep some flow going and for some fountains for oxygenation.

Another garden feature to consider is what is used in England and France. It is called a HaHa. It basically means that there is a big drop when you walk from the home toward the field. It is completely invisible from the home and looks like a wall from the field. These have been used for centuries around British farm homes. The yard inside the HaHa can be as big as you like and the farm animals can't cross the HaHa. It gives the impression that the yard and field are continuous when viewed from the home.

Here is a link that might be useful: The HaHa

Just because it is big doesn't mean it won't need filtration. If you simply dig a big hole you may well dig yourself an algae pit. The fish will be fine and so will allllll the algae. A pond your size to have clear water needs mechanical filtration unless you don't mind not being able to swim in it, or even necessarily to see to the bottom of it (think about how many lakes/ponds you have seen where you can actually see the fish swimming in them).

However, if you plan it right to have natural veggie filtration with a bog around the perimeter you will have "healthy" water but not necessarily the cleanest looking water.

If you properly design the sides of the pond to act as bogs with permeable retaining walls around large portions of the sides you should be able to avoid mechanical filtration to a large degree. However if you have large areas of water surface that get lots of sun you WILL have green water without mechanical filtration. You could hamper this by putting shelves in places where you could put a lot of lillies or other floaters that can eat up the sunlit surface area.

One thing you REALLY need to consider is drainage from the lawn and street. Have you seen the property in a big rain? Herbicides and pesticides from your lawn or your neighbors lawn that drain in to the pond in a rain will kill fish and plants. Even if the water doesn't drain off the surface it will get in to an earthbottom pond through the water table. So think about having the perimeter elevated slightly to avoid run off and doing an EPDM liner (which will be spendy) if you have any storm drains or other major run off that may get inside.

Thats a huge pond are you going to put in a liner?

I probably shouldn't have posted anything. That pond sits in between my 3 million gallon pond and my 10,000 gallon pond in a realm that I have no experience with. I read the depth right, 2-4 feet. That strikes me as very shallow, though I understand such relatively shallow ponds are used for commercial raising of fish (seasonal in northern states). Lined or unlined, my knee-jerk reaction was and still is that the summer heat will be a problem. I think algae will be a big problem, and that is why I thought many plants - and fish that don't tend to overpopulate. I think filtration is a big consideration with such a shallow pond. But (again) I don't have experience with ponds this shallow, so I probably shouldn't have posted in the first place. And I didn't / don't intend to sound negative. A project like this could be a whole lot of fun. I would do a bunch more research before I sprung for such an expensive project, I wouldn't necessarily trust a contractor to know what he/she is doing, and I'd worry about the design so ongoing expenses didn't eat me alive. Better yet, I should shut up.

My pond is from 2' to 4' deep. I am really happy with it. I can put on a pair of waders and do any work that needs to be done. The ponds at Longwood Gardens are about 2'to 3' deep. I took two ponds courses at Longwood and chuckled when I found that they get their waders at Cabela's just like I do.

I have a large pond- @½ acre- and it is self sufficient. Loaded with fish, turtles, frogs etc. The problem is that the water is always 'muddy'. I am now building a very large waterfalls and wondered if there was perhaps some way to incorporate natural 'gravel' type filtering or something else to help clear it up. Or if anyone has other suggestions for how to clear up a muddy pond. the waterfalls will run at about 30,000 gallons per hour.

thanks,

jg