Paige, TX Half Acre Pond Rehab: Two Feet Deeper, Banks and Dam Re-clayed

An old half acre pond in the Lost Pines outside Paige had stopped holding water. Three days on site with a Cat D3 took the basin two feet deeper to eight feet at center, cut the banks to four to one, and spread the clay that came out of the cut back over the banks and the dam. No bentonite, no truckload of clay, and a pond that was built to hold what it catches. This page shows the ground before, during and after, and what the three days cost.

The finished half acre pond basin at Paige Texas seen from the dock corner, clay from the cut spread on the banks and dam

An old pond that had gone dry

The before photos show what a pond looks like when it has been giving its water back to the ground for years: a shallow saucer of cracked dark mud, weeds and sprouts creeping in from the edges, and a puddle in the middle where the last of the rain sat. It had been dug at about six feet, which is not enough depth to carry a Bastrop County summer, and the ground under it was letting water through. The owner had a dock on one bank and no water under it.

This is the most common pond call we take in the Lost Pines. The sandy ground across Bastrop, Lee and Fayette counties drains, and a pond dug shallow into it without any attention to what the basin is made of will not hold. The question on every one of them is the same: is there clay within digging depth, and can the pond be cut deep enough to reach it and use it.

Two feet deeper, and why that is the whole job

The D3 stripped the dried mud and the growth off the old floor and took the basin down another two feet, to eight feet at center. Two feet does not sound like much. On a shallow pond it is the difference between water in September and mud in September. A six foot pond gives up a large share of its volume to evaporation every summer and warms through to the bottom. Eight feet keeps a cool layer under the warm one and means a dry stretch takes the level down instead of taking the pond.

The banks were cut to four to one, the standard slope on our price list. It gives a consistent edge that holds its shape, a shelf shallow enough for cattle or a wade in, and a floor the dozer can track pack tight. The during photos show the cut floor and the fresh banks with the machine in the middle of them.

Clay from the cut, no bentonite

What made this a three day job instead of a five figure one was what came out of the ground. The deeper cut reached clay. Instead of trucking in sodium bentonite, the D3 pushed the native clay from the floor up and out over the banks and the dam, spread it, and track packed it. A clay blanket over the porous upper soil does what bentonite does, closes the pore space water was leaving through, at the cost of a few extra dozer passes rather than a $6,500 truckload.

It is not always available. On a site where the cut hits sand all the way down, or fractured rock, there is nothing to spread and the seal has to come in on a truck; that was the Lockhart pond a few days earlier. The site walk is where we find out which one you have, and it is why we do not quote a seal from a photo. The bentonite page covers the trucked in version and has a calculator for it.

What it cost

The job ran $9,000 to $10,000: three days of the Cat D3 at the published $3,000 a day, plus transport to Paige. That is the whole number. No clay purchase, no second machine, no haul off. The stripped mud and the extra spoil from the cut stayed on the property, in the dam and the banks.

Set that against the two other ways this could have gone. Left alone, the owner keeps a dry hole with a dock on it. Rebuilt with bentonite because the cut had not reached clay, it would have looked like Lockhart: trucked in bentonite and four days, $20,000 to $22,000. Finding clay at eight feet is what made this the cheap version of a pond rehab, and the only way to know which version a pond is going to be is to walk it and put a shovel in the floor.

Does every leaking pond need bentonite

No, and this pond is the proof. Bentonite is for a basin that has no clay of its own to work with. When the cut reaches clay, the clay is the seal, and the job is dozer time and nothing else. The bucket test tells you whether the pond is leaking at all, the site walk tells you whether there is clay within reach, and the two answers together set the price. On sandy Bastrop County ground it goes either way, which is why we have a Paige job at $9,000 and a Lockhart job at $20,000 in the same month for the same size of pond.

Before and after

Pond and dirt work around Paige

We work the country around Paige regularly, across Bastrop County and the counties next to it.