How to Build a Natural Stream Pond

Tim Matson provides a guide to building a natural stream pond for your property, including pond advice and building diagrams.

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by Adobestock/MNStudio

A pond adds both beauty and value to a country home. Here’s a way to create a stream pond without resorting to expensive
and soil-damaging heavy equipment.
 (See diagrams).

A Stream Pond That Carves [and Cleans] Itself

One summer I swam in a stream pond in the second curve of an oxbow in Abbott Brook. The flow had chiseled into the bank, sweeping out a 20-foot bowl, then doubled back where the roots of a poplar grove held the bank together. Rebounding sediment had settled into a sandy beach on the shallow bank. You could swim all day against the current and never get anywhere.

This stretch of brook with its whirly-pit was one of the brightest lures when the surrounding land was deeded to a young family from California. Lee Ann and Mike turned salvage from an old carriage house into a post-and-beam saltbox near the bank and counted on the pond for household water and summer baths. One summer afternoon, with some help from their daughter Heather, they laid up a stone dam to deepen the basin to six feet. They chopped down a poplar to bridge the brook — great for hanging by the knees in the free current. But with autumn rains came a tide of silt that filled the little pond, and ice and spring snowmelt crumpled the dam.

  • Updated on Apr 15, 2022
  • Originally Published on May 7, 2021
Tagged with: DIY damn, natural damns, self-cleaning stream, water control structure
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