Not many things are as important to life on our planet as water. Building a new pond in California is expensive but its an investment in the land and in the resilience of our community that will last for generations. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to build a new pond on Freestone Ranch. When we bought the ranch, the developer had a proposal to build a 120 acre foot pond that would be filled with water pumped from Ebibias creek to irrigate 300 acres of grapes. Our pond is about 1/10 the size of the proposed pond and the water comes from sheet flow and a road that so there is no negative impact on the creeks and water shed from the pond.
A pond starts with an engineering plan and permits before the bulldozer and the scraper come. Part of the engineering of the pond is the keyway which is a compacted foundation of soil that connects the levy to the underlying bedrock. For our pond the keyway was dug 15′ deep before placing engineered compacted fill back in. It takes a few years for blackbirds, swallows, dragonflies, ducks, geese and other creature to the come to the pond but they are here now. The 12′ tule reeds on the edges of the pond provide great nest sites for the red wing blackbirds.
