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Well this pond took 4 trucks of concrete or 37 yards total and it is about 2 inches think across the whole area and thicker in some places. The concrete had fiber in it and was by far teh biggest expense of the pen. It was around $3,500 and took me, my dad and about 5/6 of his friends to get pours out of the truck and smoothed out. It wasn't all that hard because they would bring a truck out at a time but normally by time we got one done the next was there. It would have been nice to have about a 15 minute break between each truck. We started at 7am and got done at 11am and it was basically constnet work. We had one go on a big float smoothing it out, 3 with little hand floats/smoothers, 2 with shovels moving it around if there was too muvh, another with a garden hoe and 1 or 2 peole going around with sticks to make sure it was at least 2 inches deep. Before we had the concrete truck out we of course had the 6 inch drain pipe put in. We had to cover about 30sqft of pond. This pond holds somewhere between 48,000-60,000 gallons of water.
As you can see it takes up about half of the pen, but they do love the water and most of them don't venture very far off of it.
By January/February 2011 we will start construction on the Brood House (wet/dry brooders) and then a holding pen for the waterfowl we raise which I am thinking will be 60x40 or half the size of this pen.
It is something that me and my dad enjoy doing together and I hope my kids are going to get into though my oldest just wants to design his own pen and pick out the birds he wants so mayby some of them can live in the holding pen!
We have 10 acres to build on and soon will have 2-3 of that as large ponds to attact waterfowl. We also raise quail and pheasants and are trying our hand ar Turkey with little to no luck.. so we have lots of Silkies and Cochins I am not sure what we will do with them!
