Author: David Bradley

UPDATE: Another iteration…I think the embankment will go in the morning and the doubled-up liner will be folded beneath the stones rather than cut…for now.

Like I said in the earlier blog about re-digging our old pond, I hadn’t really mapped out the site and how I was going to manage it. We have now decided to use the spare acreage of Butyl liner to double line it…and we are now filling with water. If someone tells me now that that’s not the right thing to do then I’ll just tip the gravel back in the hole and stick the old garden lamp we inherited from previous owners of Pelham Towers on the resulting mound. It’ll be that or the moth trap.

Anyway, while it’s filling, we’re “pondering” what plants to buy to stock it and what rocks to use to edge it. Mrs Sciencebase would like a nano-waterfall of some sort and maybe lights…by the way, the breezeblocks and bricks are history.

An interesting tip from a US site walking you through creating a wildlife pond suggests sampling a few pints of water from a local, established pond and adding that to your own pond water to kickstart an ecosystem. It sounds as pointless as those active, bio yoghurt drinks, to be honest. And, worse, you could introduce parasites and pathogens as well as weeds from another site int your own.

I reckon once you add plants to the pond and a few birds have released copious amounts of uric acid waste into it, it will establish its own system quite quickly. We’ve also got rainwater in butts that might suffice, it’s not stagnant but definitely has some eco going on, Mrs Sciencebase having had the same thought has just checked. So, I reckon a bucket from there would be useful. Indeed, some recommend not using tapwater, but really, it’s going to take quite some time if you let just rainwater fill a pond, and the only chemicals (other than water itself) in tapwater are chlorine products which, soon get used up and the byproducts evaporate.

Meanwhile, as it’s still filling and in between chilling showers, here’s a snapshot from under our Wisteria, seven years, I think since it first blossomed.

Having decided to reinstate our garden pond after twenty years, I dug out and shaped the hole, built a mole-size mountain range and then headed to the garden centre to get some Butyl* sheeting and some sharp sand.

The sharp sand was to bed the base of the pond and hopefully reduce the risk of stones piercing the liner. The liner…calculation suggested that I needed about five square metres. Garden centre had a 6m roll, so 5x6m it would have to be and I could trim off the excess. Turned out that even with squashing the sheet down into the hole I pretty much had the same area spare. So, that’s left over. Don’t rely on an online garden centre’s calculator to work out how much you need! Lesson learned…too late.

Any, two bags of sand was just about enough, I’d recommend adding 50% to your estimate for how much you think you’d need. The mole mountain range is now backed by some breeze blocks and bricks and infilled with the gravel. I plan to get some more attractive flat stones to create a dry stone wall on this and the other bricks around the edge.

The sheeting will be cut to a better shape once the pond has water in it…next few days. And, then the edge of the lawn will be trimmed to this shame and the excess sheeting covered with some of the pea shingle that had originally covered our garden when we moved in and was used to backfill the old pond.

Aquatic soil and some aquatic plants to stock the pond as well as the aforementioned drystone wall materials will be purchased soon. Watch this space for further updates.

Butyl, or more formally butyl rubber is a synthetic rubber, a copolymer of isobutylene with isoprene, commonly used for inflatable dinghies and the like as well as pond liners.

Back in the day, we had an enormous garden pond. Dozens and dozens of frogs. Something of an accident waiting to happen with a baby and a toddler in the house. I drained it, relocated the frogspawn to friends and neighbours with ponds and donated the frogs. Fill it in with gravel and hardcore and turfed over it.

Regretted it ever since.

So, now that we have no toddlers in the house, I thought it was time to get back to aquatic nature. The original pond was kidney-shaped (classic), about 6m by 3m, you could always see where it had been as the grass was sunken and it was the patch that dried out the soonest whenever we had a prolonged dry spell. I didn’t even need to mark out the area to dig it was so obvious where that would be…although I have opted for something slightly smaller than the original an ovoid about 3×2.6m. It’s about 0.6m at its deepest with a built-up surround to one end and some “shelving”.

I started digging at 14h48 today and stopped at 16h14 (same day!). Now, I just need to buy a liner, some underlay and sand to make a firm base, get some aquatic soil to assist the plants, and, of course, some aquatic plants. I can then send out invitations to the local amphibia.

We have not decided whether to add a trickling water feature…it isn’t essential as the plants will do the requisite oxygenating of the water and will suffice unless we decide we want to keep fish…and that’s another decision that is being deferred.