making a pond ???

hi all i have been think of doing this for quite sometime now i would just like to know the best way to go around this ?? i don't want it to be square i would rather have some weird shape i am thinking 500 to 1000 gals of water with ground lighting as i would light to see my fish hehe which are prolly going to be koi or fancy goldfish what i am basically saying is if anyone know anything about making you own pond i would love to know how you went around making and how hard or how easy it was
thanks lots

 

anyone??

 

I really don't have a clue other than going to Sam's Club and buying a pond kit lol! Sorry.

 

I have seen home made pond but have not made one myself. They said it was a little work. They dug a hole, layed some kind of plastic made for this, made a waterfall out of large rocks for a fliter. As far as a light? I don't have a clue!

 

There's really not a whole lot to making a pond.

For mine, I started off by digging a big hole. Something I figured out after digging the whole is if you're going to have marginal plants, you need to make a shelf along the parimeter that's only about 6" deep, about 12" wide and make sure it's nice & flat. We didn't do that and had to go back and level out the shelf some, and add rocks for the pots to sit on. Also, if you live in someplace that get's pretty cold in the winter and plan on leaving the fish in the pond, it should be at least 3' deep. And one last consideration to make is see how large of a liner you can get and make the pond's dimensions accordingly. Here, the largest liner we could find was 15' x 15' so obviously I couldn't have a pond that was 12' wide and 3' deep.


Once the hole was dug, we put in a pre-liner to keep roots & rocks from poking holes in the liner. Then we put the liner in and filled it up.


We trimmed the excess liner and held it down with large staple-like things (we just made them out of metal coat hangers) to keep the liner from shifting.


Then we bought a ton (literally) of flag stone and started laying that around the parimeter of the pond.


And started stacking some up for a waterfall. We also used some of that expandable foam in a can stuff to help hold the rocks and seal up the back to help prevent run-off into the pond. We still get a little run-off, but not too bad.


The almost finished waterfall. The waterfall itself is up & running, but we still need to finish the rest of the stone walls. The larger rocks are just rubble rock from the local quarry. They let us go in and get a trailer full for $20 which is a lot cheaper than getting it from a landscape place.


For filtration, I have a sump pump in a plastic container. It has filter media all around it and there's holes in the lid. The whole thing sits in the bottom of the pond so the pump pulls water trough all the media and pumps it up to the top of the waterfall. You can also buy filters specifically for ponds but I got the sump pump new at a yard sale for $5 (normally retails for about $80) so it was cheaper to make my own filter.

There's a huge variety of plants available, but the one I really recomend having is water hyacinth. It does a good job of oxygenating the water and removing wastes and it's floating so it provides some shade. So in general, it's good for controling/preventing aglae. It's recomended that you have roughly 2/3 of the pond's surface covered with plants. I'm not quite there yet but once my 2 new water lillies start coming up really well I sould be close.

One last thing to keep in mind is it's a good idea to understock the pond unless you plan on doing a bunch of water changes (not a good idea). If you understock it and have lots of plants, you shouldn't have too many problems with nitrAtes. I only plan on doing 2 water changers/year and that's mainly to clean up the debris that get's in it.

That's all I can think of for now.

-Chelle

 

i dont know if this would help you with making a pond... and i don't know how good the information is since i've never owned a pond...

http://www.clubjungle.com/pages/setup_pond.asp

but they seem to know what they're talking about Good luck with your pond! Don't forget to show us your creation once you build it

 

thanks tchelle great info