Using "old" water from a large goose pond

Discussion in 'Breeding, Raising, Feeding and Caring for Animals' started by Goosegirl, Mar 23, 2010.

  1. Goosegirl

    Goosegirl New Member

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    My recent adventure of building a cement lined pond for my geese (capacity approx 2800 litres) is still being fine tuned. I clean out as much muck from the pond most days, using a scoop/strainer - by hand. I also run a pool pump for an hour most days to aerate the water. Some of the water from the pump also diverts to a home made filter in an attempt to cut out some of the droppings etc. After a few weeks of this however I really need to empty the pond and start again - the geese are pretty good at building up the poo! If I use this amount of 'rich' water on my plants, any grass areas etc. is it too potent and fresh in this form and will it be detrimental to what it goes on? Thanks for any feedback.
     
  2. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    G'day Goosegirl, welcome to the PRI Forum.

    Reads like you have yourself a very fine (but very labour-intensive) fertilizer collector happening there, but not much else, apart from a place for the ducks to have a swim (in between clean-outs). I guess there are many ways that you could go with this one. Here's one suggestion:

    Get some fauna and/or flora into the pond, something that will thrive on the available poo, and something you can sustainably harvest and get a secondary (tertiary, quaternary...) yield from. Just what, I have no idea. Nor do I know how you would stop the ducks from eating the said flora/fauna. But there are some brilliant minds on here, so I'm sure you will get an answer to this one.

    Oh, didn't Masanobu Fukuoka employ ducks in his systems?

    Good luck with it, Markus.
     
  3. Ellen

    Ellen Junior Member

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    Hi Goosegirl, we are also having geese and a nice pond for them. We just use this "rich" water directly on our trees and plants, they love it. Never seen anything dying from it. Enjoy your wonderful fertilizer!
     
  4. Goosegirl

    Goosegirl New Member

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    Thank you for your replies. It was great to find them there this evening, waiting to be read. You have given me confidence to take the plunge and clean out the pond tomorrow and spread this good stuff all around my place. (but defnitely not a literal plunge)
    thanks and cheers, Goosegirl
     
  5. RichardM

    RichardM Junior Member

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    Why not just put a sump pump in the bottom, that way you can pump out most of the solids and just top up with freshwater.
     
  6. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    That's easy for a Tasmanian to say, you folks have water running outa your ears (not literally, of course). Some of us folk have to be very miserly with the water we use, and electricity, and human energy... ;)
     
  7. RichardM

    RichardM Junior Member

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    Hey, it's been dry as a xxxxxxxx here in recent years - annual rainfall for Hobart is 616mm I thought she said she was emptying it out every few weeks anmd starting again anyway.

    I've kept ducks & geese - fact of the matter is that it's a bit of a fallacy that they need water to swim in anyway - personally, I never bothered with it and it didn't seem to worry them.
     
  8. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    Yeah, hence my suggestion that Goosegirl try and diversify her pond ecology a bit - dumping 2,800 lts of water 'every few weeks' seems like a lot of water to a water starved Central Victorian.

    Hmm, I reckon anything that has evolved to have webbed feet, must miss not being able to swim.

    We used to get by with 550 pa (mean average, 1862-1992), but now we only get 472 pa (1992-2010).

    Source: BoM

    Oh well, that's climate change for you :).
     
  9. RichardM

    RichardM Junior Member

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    Trouble is, little pond, lots of goose crap = highly, highly polluted water, (I know this because I fell in an ornamental duck lake once), the BOD will be so high that I doubt you'd get much to live in there, nothing that evolved on Earth anyway because it would be virtually anoxic; if it was bigger, maybe do what the Chinese etc do and stick some sort of bullet-proof carp in there but AFAIK that's illegal in many States, certainly the mere mention of the C-word here in Tas is enough to get you shot at dawn and rightly so.

    If you think about it, 2800L isn't in the grand scheme of things, a huge volume of water, and taking on board your "diversification of ecology" comment, which is quite right, diversification (in my mind) would also mean not overloading the capability of the pond, if you look at it as an ecosystem, to assimilate what's going in there; it wouldn't take many geese much time to totally befoul (befowl?) such a small volume of water, because basically they are feathered, web-footed sh!t machines. (I know this after seeing the result of one being locked in a car for several hours.)

    If you try to grow anything in there plant-wise, the geese would likely eat it anyway.

    Tough titties geese, life wasn't meant to be easy; I miss not lying in bed all day but I have to go to work. The fat lazy geese (and my dog & cat) do SFA, just lie about all day, nothing to worry about and no responsibilities - the least they can do is put up with a bit of inconvenience and occasional pining for the fjords or failing that, a pondful of smelly water.

    Tell you what, when they tell you they want water to swim in, tell them that they'll have to put it in writing and as they are under 18, get it counter-signed by both of their parents.
     
  10. purplepear

    purplepear Junior Member

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    Interesting though, Marko, but Geoff Lawton (is it spelt right?) says in the greening the desert Vid that geese are primarily desert creatures and ours do not spend much time in the pond but like to walk all over the farm. The ducks are mostly responsible for "muddying the waters" The geese do make a horrid mess of their water buckets over night and we empty those on to trees with good results
    regards Mark
     
  11. teela

    teela Junior Member

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    Put some water iris's in there. They have gone mad in mine. Ducks in my pond but no geese.
     

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