Fancied a change so dug a pond.

Got some of my rocks from the front garden to pin the liner down and make a bit of a rockey cascade. I ran out though but i know where i can get a load more for free to finish it off. Ive still got to work out how the final drop is going to be, whether its going to be just liner or a piece of slate for the water to run off. Im going to get some ferns and some low growing evergreen shrubs/bushes to plant round the rocks and the filter box. Ive got three pumps running into the waterfall, a 3500lph from the filter box, and a 3500lph and a 450lph pump direct from the pond. The pipe wants to be a bit longer on the 3500 pump from the pond as it only just reaches from the bottom of the pond to the front of the waterfall.Its coming on slowly and cheaply, just as i wanted it to. Its cost 70 quid for the sleepers, 45 quid for the filter box, 50 quid for the liner and 10 quid for the 10 goldfish.I will get a bit of that back when i sell my now redundant fish tank on ebay.

 

Did some tidying up round the back of the pond on saturday and got it nearly finished. Still need a bit more gravel for at the front of the pond and a proper electric point instead of the extension under the grey bucket.

 

No offence meant but it looks a bit rushed ta me, too much liner showing and the rocks look like they have just been tipped there

 

That's a bit brutal.
But I know what you mean.
One of my problems has always been, that I want to "get it done and finished" with many of my projects. There are things I could have done a bit better if I'd spent more time on them (but like many, I didn't have it).

It particularly applies to those of us who build ponds. As a past member of the Northern Koi Society, among the discussions on pond building was the common expression; "If I were to build it again I wouldn't do it that way."

But fortunately not my koi pool, as I had a year to think about it before I converted the shallow fish pond into a koi set-up and I got a lot of advice.

It's all down to with what you're happy and what you are willing to spend on the construction in time and money.
To be frank. There's no way I could justify the cost of what it would need to build my set-up now, it'd be a few thousand pounds. (My wife who's just looked over my shoulder as I type this has said; "Hmm! What about jukeboxes and saxophones?") She's got me there!

If people are happy with what they've got then that's fair enough.
There are a few things that could improve this, as the builder has shown he has the ability.
But it's all down to time and expense.

 

I agree with a lott of what you say there, I love your pond.
Maybe its just my Virgo nature as Im my own worse critic when it comes too building / making things and beating myself up when I don't get it what I consider right.
As much as I have always wanted a pond Iv never had one as yet, but I thinks its the same principle no matter what you build.
If you have very limited time or want it built yesterday then I agree things can be expensive but with a bit of imagination and not being in a rush to complete, you can save some serious money and the end product is far more satisfying.

Don't get me wrong, I have made mistakes in design and then ended up re-doing as I'm not happy with it, that ends up costing more in the long run.

Like you say, research is vital for ideas, tips and general inspiration.

 

The rock work is still a work in progress as im getting bits at different times. It costs a lot to buy these pieces and i know a road worker who is saving them for me when he is out digging. The plants should bush up a lot and cover most of the stream bit up in time so it looks more like the water is coming from some where hidden. Its mainly herbs ive planted so they smell nice when i walk past, lavender, Rosemary, Mint and Thyme. The rose is a strong smelling one and there are ground cover plants dotted around to cover any other space that may be left open. There is a few gladioli and some reeds from the canal side for height and colour. I know what you mean about the liner showing along the back edge but it needed to be wide enough for the side to not collapse but that means its too wide for the sleeper to cover it all. Ive been told about a gravel covered liner that can be used for the waterfall instead of normal liner. I tried pieces of slate but the water just ran underneath it instead of running over it and making a wall of water. Ive got water cress growing in the stream so hopefully that will eventually cover a lot of the liner.

 

Actually Kev, slate works quite well, I used to know a fellow koi enthusiast who was a builder. He removed a slate roof from a house he was demolishing and built a huge waterfall with it and covered the surround of his pool with it, building the waterfall up with many layers of slates cut and shaped like "strata" if you know what I mean.
You could use slate but you'd have to make the waterfall permanent by fixing it with waterproofed mortar.

You've got a very "dominant" wooden surround to your pool, which looks fine but you're attempting a mixture of "natural" and "formal" which if you don't mind me saying, looks a bit odd. So how about boxing in the sides and back of the waterfall with wood, making something like a one or two-step "staircase" possibly covering the outside of it with some vertical graduated cut down the centre bamboo poles, the ones on which they roll carpets are ideal. This would disguise the "box" and hide the edges of the liner and you could arrange your rocks on the steps to create the right sound and visual effect and in this way you wouldn't see the liner at all. You could arrange your planting right up against the sides of the box to soften the effect. The bamboo would weather down nicely. The end result would look more "formal" but I think it could look well. If at any time you decided to remove the waterfall, it wouldn't be a problem... Just an idea mind.

I know what you mean about rock, it is horrendously expensive unless you can make a trip to a quarry where you can "pick your own" and it's as "cheap as chips" but you really need a trailer as you can't get much in the boot of a car because of the weight.
When I built mine, and did the two patios and paths I bought several pallets of York stone. I didn't tell my wife what that cost.

 

At first it was going to be just a pond with no waterfall. The sleepers were going to be stacked higher to make it a deeper pond when funds allowed. I was looking at 500 quid more for the sleepers plus a bigger liner but im not allowed to spend that much on it, yet. I was looking at putting sleepers all round the back of the waterfall to retain the soil but didnt see the point in doing that until the pond sides were raised. The rocks are easy enough to move/swap with sleepers when the time comes. Ive seen a pond on another site that has been built with sleepers all round the back to make a bog garden with the stream running through the middle, this is what gave me the idea. Ive got plenty of roof slate available, my brother made his waterfall out of it, but he lives on a hill which made it a lot easier to do. Im limited with space behind the stream because of the greenhouse and have nothing to really hold the soil up to make a good sized mound for a decent waterfall.

 

Before I moved to Cornwall, I new a fella who used York stone type slabs and smallish york stone walling (like a miniature wall) for all the sides of the waterfall and with the moss that grew on it, it looked really natural.
His pond was a large preformed type with the miniature wall running all the way round so you couldn't see any of the actual plastic pond.
The wall was sort of random built with some gaps so I guess was also ideal for frogs and such as they could hide easily in the gaps or leave through other gaps.

A bit like in this pick but you couldn't see any black liner etc. and the rock pieces were smaller and more of a wall

 

Never mind all this, what about the veg ? :lollol:

 

I saved all the onions and ive got some spuds and green beans growing outside but its mainly just the greenhouse now. Found a medium sized frog in the stream bit the other day, i think its from the few tadpoles that i kept in that bit.One frog from about 300 tadpoles.

 

Just read your page today well done you will have created something that changes daily and will give you lots of enjoyment.

 

Don`t want to be a party pooper, but at 8ft by 5ft by 3ft, that pond is not big enough for the fish you are keeping. If I remember correctly, it needs to be, 1 cubic foot per inch length of fish.:gnthb:

 

You can stock heavier than that though providing the filter is large enough to cope easily.

Val

 

This is true.
The problem is that the manufacturers of filters sometimes seem a bit optomistic about the efficiency of their filters.
Twenty-five years ago I remember the subject coming up at a koi society meeting, when a lot of "new filter technology" came onto the market, the joke was that filters would soon be the size of a matchbox. But no one was "'avin' it."

A rule of thumb, is that the pump used should push the total volume of the pool through the filter every three hours.

But the most important feature of a filter system is the "dwell time." That is, how long the water takes to pass through the filter. It won't work properly if it's a small filter and the water "rushes" through it.

You can make a fairly accurate calculation of the dwell time, if you know the volume of your filter and the flow rate of your pump, allowing for the height it has to lift the water. It usually gives these calculations on the box.
My pool is around 3000 galls and the pump has to lift the water about seven feet, so I estimate I'm pumping roughly about 1000 galls per hour, might even be less, so with a filter capacity of 200 galls the water takes about twelve minutes to pass through them. This is probably twice as long as it need be, but when designing my set-up I intended to put my filters in a dedicated room the garage, I could err on the safe side as I hadn't got the problem of trying to hide them in the garden. This gives the biological process more than enough time to work.