How I built my Water Garden...PondWATER GARDENS
Water gardens. Water features. Ponds. What do they all have in common? Water! Water is a great way to add some character and beauty to your yard. My best tip for you if you plan on a water garden or pond is to first buy a few books on the subject and get educated! I see so many ponds built and maintained in ways that I just say “ugh!” and wonder why they are doing that. I have asked “didn’t you read about ponds first?” and they always say no. So please research ponds BEFORE you build one. The second tip is, bigger is better! Making the pond bigger is not much more maintenance and you will have more room to add plants, fish or other features, whereas if you have a small one, you are limited in what you can do with it. Everyone I speak to about ponds wishes they had built a bigger one. But be reasonable, don’t dig out more than you can chew! Books about water gardens are a nice resource for ideas as well. And be sure to remember “shelves” for potted water plants! Be sure to choose your location carefully. You want some shade, but trees will add to pond maintenance by dropping leaves.
Before the pond...
this is the spot where we would build my water garden
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You will have to decide if you want a hard shell/pre-made shape, or a flexible liner for your water garden. There are pros and cons to both. Hard shell/pre-made shapes are very durable and you wont have to worry so much about springing leaks. It also takes out the “guess-work” of what shape to make, where do you put shelves (as many have them built in) and many companies offer “accessories” that fit that shape such as waterfalls and fountains and streams. However, they also limit you in shape and depth, and you need to dig out a hole to specifically fit the shape of the shell. Which can be a harder task than just digging any hole. You also need to be aware of the “frost line” in your state. If you plan on keeping fish in the pond all winter, then you need to make the pond deep enough so it will not freeze all the way down to the bottom.
I personally preferred a flexible liner. We really were not sure how big or what shape we wanted to do, and as we dug, the shape changed as we hit large roots or rocks (we did not want to injure the tress by cutting roots, so we worked around them). If you use a flexible liner, be prepared to remove any and all debris that could damage the liner such as hard roots, small rocks and pebbles, etc. You will need to pour enough sand in to hole to line the hole with, at the very least, 6 inches of sand. More is better, try for 8-12 inches. If you wet the sand, you will be able to line the sides of the hole as well. THEN you need to line the pond/water garden with a “pond liner” that can be purchased from garden centers. However, they can be very expensive also. So we used, believe it or not, carpet padding! We made it 2 layers thick, was cheaper, easy enough to work with, and after over 6 years, shows no signs of wearing down and being any problem. The only problems I see with the flexible liners is the possibility of them getting holes in them from a number of sources; rocks, roots, birds, ice, to name a few. The other problem is that the liner is very hard to get to lay flat in the water garden and any folds in the liner will harbor dirt and debris and can be an area of stagnant water and cause health problems. You also need to make sure that the flexible liner is under water at all times so it doesn’t break down from the sun. Make sure the liner you choose is bigger than the hole you dig, as you need to build up the sides a bit and put the liner over that. Then you can line the edge with your rocks and such. We were given a bunch of patio stones and used those to line the pond along with some river rocks. The patio stones were NOT a good idea. They have begun to break apart, and the moss and plants growing around them are the only thing holding them together at this point. But the moss growing on them is beautiful and adds a more natural look to my water garden.
A NOTE ABOUT WATER GARDENS AND PONDS! The name “pond” is misleading and people build one expecting it to take care of itself like a natural pond. Untrue! It is nothing more than an outdoor aquarium! However, bigger ones will require less specific care than smaller ones. As larger ones will develop natural/biological filtration and have more “air space” which helps in maintenance as well as a larger water area to dilute pollutants. I also recommend against using stone to line the bottom of a pond as it just becomes a place that holds in dirt and debris and needs to be cleaned more often, as well as being harder to clean than a smooth plastic liner on the bottom.
Once you have your water garden built, you are ready to add water! Ooh this is the fun part! I suggest filling slowly to make sure everything falls in place the way you like. Once you have your pond filled, it is NOT time to add fish yet! Did I say NOT TIME!? I strongly suggest you let the pump/filter assembly run for a few days, and make sure everything is ok with the pond, you would hate to add fish and find out you have a leak and they all die because the water runs out.
Adding water!
the pond is built and we are ready for plants!
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adding plants and fish to your pond...After you have determined that your new water garden is not leaking, and the pump has run for a few days to help air out the water, add a few plants. You can add floating plants that do not need to be “planted” such as water hyacinth, or pick a few plants that need to be in pots. I have used both soil in the pots and also just small pebbles and both seem to work just fine. If you use soil, do not use anything that has fertilizers added. I would also recommend against potting soil. I use plain “topsoil” and put a layer of small stone in the bottom and on the top. After your plants have been in there a week or two, then you can add fish. Please do not add a bunch of fish all at one time! It is better to add just a few at a time. Of course the bigger the pond the more you can add at one time. But it is still better to wait and add fish to your water garden in small numbers.
IMPORTANT MAINTENANCE TIPS FOR WATER GARDENS AND PONDS
Yes you will have to perform regular maintenance on your pond. How much depends on the size, sun or shade, how many plants, and how many fish. More sun means more maintenance duties. My pond is somewhere around 800 gallons and we do 2 water changes a year, one in spring and one in fall. Much like an aquarium water change, we do not remove all the water, but only about half. Using a pond cleaner, we suck up the water from the bottom where all the sediment is, as well as all around the rocky areas.
BE SURE TO CHECK WITH LOCAL CODES BEFORE BUILDING YOUR POND!
Leaves and other debris need to be scooped out on a regular basis, even daily at times. I use barley straw to help combat algae as well as aquarium salt to help improve fish health. You also should have some way to aerate the water, such as a waterfall or fountain. The water movement not only helps the water stay healthier, but also discourages mosquitoes.
Over feeding fish is bad. I feed mine a pinch per fish every other day. As it gets closer to the fall season, I put a thermometer in the water. Stop feeding the fish when the water temperature gets down to 50-55 degrees. When spring approaches, do not start feeding the fish until the water stays at a steady 50-55 degrees.
Heaters? Whenever we have tried to use heaters or other devices to keep the pond from freezing, they were a disaster and never worked right. So now we just let it be over the winter. Let it freeze IF DEEP ENOUGH! We have never lost a fish over the winter.
my pond gets prettier every day...
where's the fish???
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Next, once your pond is established, learn to get up early, before everyone else, and enjoy a cup of tea next to your pond and watch the sun come up. You will love it!
Tea Time!
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My Fishies!
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We change our filtration system...There is nothing like having a pond in your back yard. Right now it is 6:42 am on a Saturday morning and I am sitting in my back yard listening to the birds and my waterfall. Taking time out of my typing to watch the fish swim around and listen to my duck munch happily on his breakfast. These are the kinds of mornings I live for. Cool and crisp and pleasantly filled with the sounds of nature. Occasionally a loud tuck or motorcycle goes by disturbing the serenity of it all, but after years of this I have become quite efficient at making those sounds something else in my brain.
I started writing this to tell you about the changes we made this year to our filtration system in the pond. I have always been quite pleased over the success of our little pond. Nine years old and no fish fatalities (except for the one Merlin the duck got) until this spring. But I blame that on the winter we had. One day it was so warm you wore a t-shirt, that night it was so cold you were crying for summer and huddled under 5 blankets. The sudden and wide range of temperatures made the fish a bit confused. On those warm days the fish came up to the shallow end of the pond, and that evening it got so cold so fast one poor fishy couldn’t make it to the bottom of the pond fast enough and he got stuck in the shallow end. He unfortunately didn’t make it. In the spring when the pond finally thawed, I scooped his poor lifeless body from my pond. My Pretty Fish (his name by the way) was no more. I was saddened by the loss, but to help console me, dear hubby went out and purchased me 3 new fishies. But I digress…
So, every year we have this beautiful pond. No spring time algae bloom to uglify the water. I credit that to using barley straw. I plop a small “bale” in every fall, and every spring before the water warms up I plop in another one. I also do 2 water changes a year. But we have always had the clearest water. You could drop in a sesame seed and see if almost 3 feet down our water is so clear. We were using just a Becket brand pond filter. The kind you would pick up at the Home Depot for about $80. We put it in a small filter box with a piece of filter material. The water was beautiful, but the maintenance was a pain. EVERY day and sometimes TWICE a day we had to pull that out, take the box apart and rinse the filter. I finally decided it was time for a new setup.
I loved the idea of a pressurized system that when it came time to clean, all you had to do was flip a switch. But the price tag and the size of the unit turned me off. So what else should I do? I really did not want to spend more than $200 and wanted something small that would be easy to hide in my tiny yard. My hubby and I also wanted to be able to easily (note I said EASILY) incorporate it into a small waterfall.
We visited a nearby landscape supply that also had a small area of pond equipment. The fellow there was very helpful. He recommended a new pump (as ours from THD was shot, again, never last more than a year or two) and a Fishmate Bio Pondfilter. Model 5000G-BIO. I was a little skeptical, but it seemed like an easily maintained design and would be easy enough to hide (it was green which helped!) and the price was right. He gave us a nice discount so the pump, filter, all hoses and connections came to $189. I was happy.
So off we went, built a water added the filter and pump and turned it all on. You can see the filter a bit, but with some silk vines and a few real vines added around it, it blends in nicely enough so that I can ignore it (much like the trucks driving by). But after a few weeks I noticed the water didn’t have the clarity I am used to. You could see al the way to the bottom and some of the fishies colors looked off like the pond had a slight brownish/grey cast to it. I was almost ready to return the filter. But I loved how easy it was to maintain. Cleaning was a breeze. No hands in the water like before. No cleanings every day. All I had to do was pop the top off, pull out the filter foam, rinse, put back, done. Didn’t even need to turn the system off. I loved it. But the water is cloudy (whine whine whine).
So one day I am looking at the filter foam material and it comes to me. It’s the foam. It has much larger holes in it than the tye we used in the previous filter. So there is particulate matter floating in the pond, giving the water that off color. So I start experimenting.
What I finally ended up doing was removing half of the stones that came with the bio filter. I had to remove some to make room for the extra foam filter material. I figured in my pond that is ok as my pond is heavily planted (lots of plants). I purchased some filter material with very fine holes in it (from my favorite pond supply guy) and cut it to fit under the material that came with the filter unit. By the next day, my pond water is so clear you can see that sesame seed fall all the way to the bottom. So far it seems as though we can go a few days before it needs to be cleaned too. I am happy! What a nice filter system. The only thing it needs is a finer filter.
If you try this, you will need to experiment like I did. Depending on your actual pump and the rate of flow, you may have a problem with the filter overflowing. And it wont do it right away! It will do it slowly and overflow in the middle of the night on you. So be careful and diligent in watching it. For this reason I never put pumps on the bottom of the pond. They should always be placed on a shelf about half way down. This way if there is ever a malfunction, it doesn’t empty the pond on my and kill my happy fishies!
Be Blessed!
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