Clip Art of a Stream River Pond and Lake
A pond adds both beauty and value to a state home. Here'southward a way to create a stream swimming without resorting to expensive
and soil-damaging heavy equipment. (See diagrams).
A Stream Swimming That Carves [and Cleans] Itself
Ane summer I swam in a stream swimming in the 2d curve of an oxbow in Abbott Brook. The menstruation had chiseled into the bank, sweeping out a 20-foot bowl, and then doubled back where the roots of a poplar grove held the bank together. Rebounding sediment had settled into a sandy embankment on the shallow bank. Yous could swim all day against the electric current and never become anywhere.
This stretch of brook with its whirly-pit was one of the brightest lures when the surrounding country was deeded to a young family unit from California. Lee Ann and Mike turned salve from an erstwhile railroad vehicle firm into a post-and-beam saltbox virtually the banking concern and counted on the pond for household water and summertime baths. One summer afternoon, with some help from their daughter Heather, they laid up a rock dam to deepen the bowl to vi feet. They chopped downwards a poplar to bridge the beck — keen for hanging past the knees in the gratuitous electric current. Only with autumn rains came a tide of silt that filled the little swimming, and ice and bound snowmelt crumpled the dam.
Just south, Dave and Victoria built a silo house out of dismantled Army barracks trucked from Michigan. It was a memorial to austerity and sixties sentiment. Really monumental were their cellar sauna and front-yard pond. The sauna was a real beauty. Articulate cedar boards lined the interior, and two racks of slatted benches crisscrossed the room. A mail-order canvas-metallic stove burned with cheery ruby cheeks almost a knee-loftier window that peered over a rocky brook. During tower construction, David and Tor had permit the beck run loose. With the firm together, they looked effectually and decided to make a swimming. They congenital a stone dam and shoveled silt out of the bowl. The dam was laid up loose enough to laissez passer the flow and contain a pool. It filled deep enough to inspire David, after a midnight sauna, to climb the ladder to his tower roof and leap for the dark pond below. But bound came with runoff that punched out the dam and swept in a load of silt — a nuisance for the rest of the states and potentially fatal for David.
So a ritual grew in the summertime. Neighbors gathered at unlike stream ponds for dam repair and silt shoveling. Given a good blend of hot sun and cold beer it was OK, until you got your toe crunched. I began to ponder a better solution. I institute it in a fifteen-year-old illustrated bulletin published by the New York State Conservation Section.
"The stream pond," I read, "must lie below the dam." It's but geology: Pools course naturally in the wake of a waterfall.
"Log pyramid pool digger" is the title the conservationists tagged their pond-making method, and it wasn't long before I saw how smoothly it worked. With my neighbors, Blake and Aletta, who live on the brink of Podunk Brook, I raised a barrier of logs and stones across the water, triggering a waterfall that carved out a pond. At present information technology flows like a self-propelled excavator and even sweeps itself clean every spring — a wizard'southward impoundment. We just call information technology the digger pond.
A sidehill swimming is a bath; the digger is a whirlpool. Still-water ponds prevarication nether water ice half the twelvemonth; the churning digger swimming freezes for two or iii of wintertime's coldest months, at most. The digger attracts native trout without trapping them, simultaneously stirring up a richly aerated pond suitable for cage-culturing fish.
Every bit with all forms of pond making, success depends on tapping natural advantages of terrain. A stream has a manner of hinting at the all-time site for a digger pond: a hollow that could be enlarged, a ho-hum shallow period betwixt stable banks, or a pool already forming nether existing falls. Banks should be at least three or four anxiety loftier and sites prone to flooding avoided.
The size of the digger basin will be limited by the breadth of the stream, so look for a site broad enough to let you stretch out — "Ample and large, that the arms spread abroad might not be hurt," equally Cicero described the platonic swimming — simply non so wide that finding dam materials is difficult, or where watershed runoff will overload the structure. A stream spanning ten to twenty feet, communicable runoff from less than 10 square miles, works well. Dam materials should be close at hand. Our digger dam was built with copse felled at the site. Round timbers most a foot in diameter make the best structure, with hemlock, cedar, and tamarack topping the list. For longest durability, the bark should exist peeled. Stones can be used in place of timber, although the dam will be less constructive, if quicker to build.
Dams are subject to a trio of wracking forces: sliding, crushing, and overthrow. A stiff foundation will forbid sliding, and a tight construction will avoid crushing and overthrow. The all-time foundation for a digger is bedrock or solid bottom. A base of sand or mud will undermine the construction. If you lot neglect to find a solid base, it may be possible to create one using an former loggers' technique for building stream-driven dams: Drive a row of wooden pilings into the streambed to go along the lesser from washing away and to form a base to which the sills of the dam can exist bolted.
To be most effective, the dam should residuum on a pair of sill timbers that traverse the stream, lying flat on the lesser and butted into the banks. To ensure that the dam does not slide, an elaborate anchoring technique was suggested in the N.Y. Country Bulletin. A trench is excavated nearly two feet wide, iv feet deep into the banks, the base level with the streambed. If stream water is high, it may be diverted to i side by temporary dams fabricated of logs or stone. Hither on the Podunk, to save labor and comply with Vermont regulations against stream course alteration, we plant low-h2o construction all-time.
Drift bolts are used to pivot the twin timbers to the streambed, and an additional log is entrenched most four feet upstream. The sills are then tied to this anchor log with galvanized poultry wire. The pond maker drills one-inch holes every 6 feet or so in parallel sills and pins downward the base by sledge hammering three-quarter-inch concrete reinforcing bars through the logs, deep into the streambed. Six-pes lengths of rebar sunk five anxiety deep exit a pes to crimp over and hold down the sills. Obstructions in the streambed may be sidestepped past repositioning the bolts or backfilling and weighing down the butt ends of the sills. Additional drift bolts should exist pinned 2 feet to either side of the joints. The half dozen-inch anchor log is then entrenched almost 4 anxiety upstream of the sills, affluent with the streamed, and migrate-bolted or otherwise firmly secured. The chicken wire is then used to tie the sills to the anchor, likewise every bit create a ramp to sweep water over the dam. The wire is blanketed over the width of the stream and secured to the anchor log and sills with galvanized nails or staples. Fine brush is layered over the wire and anchored with flat stones to complete the seal. Finally, ii logs of similar girth are fitted into the sill crevice and spiked at the exterior ends, leaving a midstream gap of a pes or ii. The primal opening is and then cut broad plenty to pass the unabridged menstruation of the stream into the center of the pond. This trimming should be synchronized with a run of low h2o. Additional spikes are added to secure the logs, with an eight-inch board nailed over the exposed sills to cleat the wire
Of course, naught in the globe of natural stream ponds resembles such a construction. Aletta, Blake, and I didn't hesitate to assemble a simpler digger dam. We bridged the stream with a pair of balsam timbers, anchored the butts with stones, and backfilled the upstream side with more stones. By adding a rim of stones at the downstream end of the pond, Aletta made sure than even in a drought the swimming spans 15 feet with four or five feet of water.
Blake and Aletta are guaranteed a regular catch from the swimming in flavor. And since the pond is cupped at the head of a stretch of water that flows expressionless south, information technology gathers straight and reflected sun. Last summer Blake built a sauna at the northwest stop of the pond, taking advantage of the sun to supplement the sauna'south wood burn down. Through all just the deepest freeze, the swimming stays clear for sauna baths. If their household water freezes upwards, the digger pond holds a reservoir of emergency h2o.
"Information technology looks similar a backwards dammed pond," Blake said awhile dorsum, soaking under the falls between saunas. "But it sure does piece of work."
EDITOR'Due south Notation: Before altering the form or flow of any stream, cheque with your local water resource agency to be sure you lot'll be in compliance with the appropriate stream modification laws.
This article is reprinted past permission of The Countryman Press from Earth Ponds: The State Pond Maker'southward Guide, copyright 1982 by Tim Matson.
Originally published equally "The Digger" March/Apr 1986 MOTHER EARTH NEWS.
Source: https://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/stream-pond-zmaz86mazgoe/
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