Pond Construction

Construction of my New Pond

History

Having moved to the current house in August 1999 I had been without a pond for a while because of a couple of short term house moves. Lynn and my self married on September 19th 1999. On the 20th construction of the first pond on this property began, there's a honeymoon for you!

I had not thought about the possible consequences of building a pond when we bought this house at the top of Clevedon in North Somerset. I had only previously lived on low level ground and all of my pond digging had been in clay soil. On plunging my shade into the soil for the first time things became obvious that I had a different situation here. The spade went in 4" and that was it, solid rock!

The First Pond

I had a blank sheet with the back garden as the previous owners were not into gardening so there was nothing worth saving. Having removed what little top soil there was in the outlined area I stated with a pickaxe moving the rock. The first 6" was quite loose and came up fairly easily, but as I got deeper things got harder and the going was slow.

We have quite a large garden and the perimeter between our garden and next-door on two sides is by wooden fence panels, 44 of them. So to hide a few we decided to build a bank behind the pond that would contain many plants and flowers, also it would make a fantastic backdrop for a waterfall. I work in the GRP Industry and have access to secondhand meter square tank panels, a footing was cast and an L shape arrangement 7mtr x 5mtr and 2mtr high was bolted together to make the framework for the bank. This was positioned away from the fence by two feet on the long side and four feet on the short. The short side would be the area for the filtration. All this was documented by digital photo, but unfortunately most of these photos were lost when the hard drive went down on the computer!

I wanted a large drop waterfall of 4' and decided that I would build the pond in a figure 8 style. Plan being that because of the large drop from the waterfall it would create a lot of surface disturbance. With the water falling in the small part of the pond, this would reduce disturbance in the main. I spent the whole of Autumn, Winter and Spring in that hole with pickaxe in hand. Fortunately the Winter was a dry one and time lost to bad weather was minimal. Evening after work, I would be out there with a floodlight!

As Summer 2000 approached I really wanted to get the pond up and running, but still had much rock to remove so I started hiring a Kango each weekend at a cost of £23.00 a time. With the Kango I could remove twice as much rock during a weekend. It did not make the work load any easier as I had twice as much rock to wheel up onto the bank. After several weekends of hiring the Kango I could see money going down the drain in hire fees, so I shopped around for best prices and bought my own Kango for £750.00, retail at that time was £1,100.00.

By June 2000 I had removed all the rock I could. I wanted to go deeper, but at 4' and having spent nearly a year, that was it. Not happy, but total gallonage would be around 6,000 UK. The rock spoil on the bank was covered with around 6" of top soil and was planted out with many herbaceous perennials.

Using 2" x 1" battens drilled, rawl plugged and screwed to the rock of the pond sides, to these I screwed 4' x 4' Glass Fibre sheets. I then back filled the gap with concrete.

You will see from the photo that I included a small area separated from the main pond for a lily and a few flag irises. This proved unsuccessful as the water level was kept just over the divider and the koi kept climbing over, often with most of their body out of the water!

I removed all of the loose rock to a depth of about 6" and cast a footing on the firm rock at the edge of the pond walls. and built up two courses of blocks. The gap between the GRP sheet and the blocks was then back filled with concrete and the inside of the pond was laminated with Glass Fibre.

The pond had two bottom drain feeding two settlement vortex's and two multi chamber filters with Japanese matting. It was filled and the Koi went in in August 2000, very near a year after starting.

Overall dimensions were 25' long by 12' wide and 4' deep. From the edge of the pond to the right in the above photo and taking in the small tree you see in the little castle box I built an imitation dry stone wall. The rock was cemented at the back, but not at the front. The area to the left of the photo was then back filled with topsoil, this gave me a planting depth of two feet for the garden.

Sadly, the above photos are the only ones left as record of this pond.

Carry on to page 2 Time to make it bigger.