Creating Paradise on 5 Acres or Less - Decentralized Water Retention for a Sustainable Homestead

Learn how to create your own paradise through decentralized water retention:
www.waterstories.com/core-course
This project implements water harvesting to capture and store the rainwater from the roof of the house in a natural swimming pond. This is the best kind of natural swimming pool, with an earthen bottom and lots of stones, a dock, and human interaction features to enjoy the water.
The terraces grow a wide variety of edible and medicinal species, while also helping to infiltrate the rain. The circulation system helps to filter and clean the water with the natural bacteria living around the rocks in the waterway. The pond even grows fish, and supports wildlife like fox and heron.
If you want to make something similar on your own landscape join us in the Water Stories community to learn how.
Water Stories is a community committed to water cycle restoration with films, videos, articles, webinars, live events, and a whole training program for those ready to become practitioners.
www.waterstories.com/core-course
www.waterstories.com/community

[@britishjolo]

Royal quality . Lakes. trees. fog . snow

[@isaacnazar]

Beautiful, thank u for sharing

[@loosenatural8171]

Absolutely amazing. You doing amazing work. Keep sharing this simple message.

[@georgewhitehouse8630]

❤❤

[@JohnMarsing]

That's awesome
Thanks for the video

[@natneopit5366]

Herons, as perhaps you already know, can eat most of the fish of your lake, I think that some hideouts deep in the lake, as pipes or something similar, would provide for your fish a safe place to avoid the predation of herons. At least some of your fish would survive. Probably you have already implemented some solution for this issue. I don't eat fish but I think that this woody and watery landscape is shaped brilliantly in many ways, it's very well planned in many main issues and details to take into account so as to work all the year round no matter the conditions (composition of the soil; the cycle or availability of water throughout the seasons; the gradient of the surfaces; creation of habitats and, at the same time, natural filters for water; etc.). Beautiful paradise.

[@searchingfortruth619]

Hi ive recently found your channel - amazing work! Have you considered founding a water land trust which buys land for restoration purposes?

[@BarryMambo]

Great work, what a nice place to live! You mentioned that there wasn't enough clay - how could you seal te pond then? Did you have to use a foil?

[@nancyb1587]

Hello, can you do something like this in a sandy soil environment? Prairie; loom sand?

[@sarafaria4155]

Very beautiful. I wish i could have something like that but we have a serious problem with mosquitoes here. Even with fishes and other aquatic animals.. its impossible to deal with them.

[@BarryMambo]

That is also one my main concerns with creating a rainwater retention pond on our property.
I have 3 main questions about that:
1. Can there be something like a "safety distance" between a pond and our house - so that mosquitos can't do us any harm?
2. Can you create an ecosystem where most mosquitos from a pond get eaten by fish, amphibiae, bats, birds etc.?
3. Does the main wind direction matter, might the mosquitos get blown away if the wind goes mostly into the pond's direction?

[@dominikalexander920]

@@BarryMamboi can only attest to question 2:
we have a swimming pond here and a big mosquito issue in the region and on the property. Everywhere, except near the pond. I guess the frogs and Dragonflies eat most of them

[@quiksilver1j]

I live in Florida.. Mosquitoes breed in water without ecology . a pond with proper ecology won't have mosquito isses

[@Water_Stories]

It's counter intuitive, but healthy water bodies have plenty of predators and therefore very few mosquitos. Mosquito larvae in the water are sitting ducks and food for everything else. It's in areas with seasonal puddles, areas with water but no aquatic predators, where mosquitos really thrive.
Usually it's a little more buggy at times around dusk and dawn right around the water, but outside of that you don't notice any increase. In fact some students have noticed a decrease, at times when there were tons of mosquitos elsewhere, around the water bodies there were fewer.

[@dominikalexander920]

I'm curious how big of a pump one would need for a system like that? and how much well water gets pumped in the pond now with the fish in there?
I'm also curious in how you sealed the pond.
I'm thikning about installing a feature like this with my existing pond for a couple of weeks now

[@tribalwind]

We're on 1.25acre. Heavy clay but heavy shale so it drains.. i wouldn't want an empty pond for months, would have to buy in bentonite clay or use a rubber liner as bad as that is.

[@plantherain]

natural clay

[@Water_Stories]

it sounds like you have the ingredients, maybe just a matter of getting them sorted in the right way

[@isaacnazar]

Question: you say the water filter down the channel feeds the fish, can u give me any more information about that? At least a name so i can look for it? I wanna know how to create a low maintenance pond and this comes really handy

[@Water_Stories]

extensive aquaculture instead of intensive aquaculture

[@isaacnazar]

thank u

[@annashealthylifeeverything8583]

What is a biofilter?

[@uggali]

Stones and plants and bacteria. Hippies have buz words too

[@allocater2]

I own no land and my parents have a 0.01 acre garden.

[@SideshowBen206]

Birdbath

[@loosenatural8171]

Come live with us in Spain

[@uggali]

Trout is the blandest fish I’ve ever tasted