I’ve been thinking about building a pond in our garden for ages. After cutting the grass this morning, I finally decided to throw caution to the wind and give it a shot. We can’t run electricity to anywhere in the garden, for three reasons.
- I don’t have the skill to do that
- I can’t afford to pay anyone to do that
- I dread the day we ask someone to look at our electrics, because I fear the previous owners’ skills and enthusiasm
As a result, any pond will have to keep itself clean (solar powered pumps just aren’t up to the job, apparently). We’ve got an algae problem in the water bucket thing I put together earlier in the year, and I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with an algae problem in the pond. However, I’m not planning on putting fish in it, and if the local wild life don’t use it, then so be it.
I still want to build one!
We decided to start small, and use a pre-formed pond container thing. We almost bought quite a large one, but decided to start very conservatively initially. If it works, and it’s fun, we might go bigger. However, as it turned out I’m glad we started small. The second choice was where to place it. We knew we wanted it at the bottom end of the garden, and since you can’t really see that from the house, it didn’t matter if it was the left or right side.
Given that algae issues are worse when ponds are subjected to a lot of continuous direct sunlight, we wanted somewhere with a bit of shade. It was either left side near the fence, right side in the corner between the fence and the shed, or right side between the shed, Zorblag the troll, and our willow tree.
In the end, we went for the third option. That area gets the most shade, but still gets plenty of light as well, and we like the idea of Zorblag looking out over a new water vista.
For some reason, I decided doing this on one of the hottest days of the year, after having already been in the garden for a couple of hours cutting the grass would be sensible. I started digging. Well, I say digging, but really, it was more a case of excavating. The turf layer was fine, but immediately below that was rubble. Big pieces of rubble.
It’s a mixture of reinforced concrete, bricks, and cement blocks from the looks of it. All of that came out of quite a small hole. I was going to take lots of pictures of the digging as it progressed, but frankly, it was too much hard work shifting the stuff to think about photographing it. I started out with a spade, but ended up doing my impression of folk on Time Team and using a hand trowel. I was literally digging around each piece of rubble to find out how big it was, and then removing it. The hole ended up being bigger than necessary, because two or three of the biggest pieces were embedded in the side of the hole, which meant I had to dig under the turf layer.
In the photo with my foot, you can see the largest selection of the rubble. I moved about 8 bags of soil as well as that rubble. I am very glad we picked the smallest of the pond liners.
After about four hours, I had the hole lined with sand, and the pond inserted. I filled the sides in as best as I could, and threw down some of the better looking pebbles that had come out of the hole. Tomorrow I need to buy the plants, and get some proper gravel or pebbles for the edges. Because the lawn isn’t flat, one edge of the pool is below the grass level, while another edge is at the grass level. It’ll have to do!
The cats spent most of the day watching me working, and as usual, they refused to do anything useful like move some soil or get me a spirit level.
Bubbles is very interested in the new addition to her garden, and I’m hopeful it’ll be an interesting feature once we get some plants in it. I really only care about it being useful for the wild life, I’m not too worried if it looks pretty. Once I get some experience keeping it clean, we might get something bigger to go in the other corner.
Here’s Bubbles, with her first look at the pool.
