Gardener’s Wisdom

My husband and I moved into our current house in August of 2006.  We were leaving behind a small tract home with a beautiful garden, pond and two greenhouses and relocating less than 2 miles away on a one acre lot.  The move was exciting and sad at the same time.  While the new house was much bigger, the new property had nothing but sagebrush and weeds on it.

I decided the first thing I wanted to have at the new house was a BIG pond.  We hired a company to come in and remove every single sagebrush and weed from our property.  We had to have a septic company come out and mark out our leach field so we didn’t damage it since the pond would be located very close to it. Then I hired a guy with a tractor.  He was in his late 70’s and very kind but we didn’t seem to communicate well.  I told him I wanted a koi pond and he started digging a ten foot deep hole.  For some reason he thought we were going to be raising bass fish.  After some laughter and some major damage to my deck from the backhoe, I had a very large hole in my yard and a huge pile of dirt.

I saw a television infomercial a couple of months before we moved that had a video that showed how to make real looking rocks from concrete.  I bought the video and my husband and I watched it at least ten times.  We went out and bought all of the materials we needed and got to work.  For the next three months we worked on the pond every weekend.  It was back breaking work but the results are fabulous.

Although it took a lot of our manual labor and tons of patience it wasn’t that hard to create.  Here are some pictures showing the progress of building the pond.

After the hole was dug, I spent every night after work for two weeks using a shovel to clean up the hole, remove any rocks and create a smooth base.

Then I enlisted my husband for the dirty work.  We stacked cinder blocks up around the side leaving a ledge about 18″ down in case the dogs fell in and needed to get out.  We also created stairs at one end to make it easier to get in a out of the pond if necessary and also to allow the dogs to get to safety if they should fall in.  My dogs had gotten into our pond a couple of times at the old house and caused quite a bit of damage to the side trying to claw their way out.

We put little “tabs” of expanded metal between the cinder blocks so the expanded metal sheets could be attached later. The reason that some of the blocks are installed sideways was to make a solid surface to put pots on or step on. You can see on the right of the photos the stairs we created.

We never drew anything on paper to give us an idea of how the pond would look when done, we just kind of let it evolve naturally.  I knew we needed a waterfall and the only restriction was the pond had to be smaller than the liner I purchased. We also had to accommodate the water pipe that would feed the water fall. We chose PVC because it is easy to work with and could be buried without any problem.

Once all of the blocks and expanded metal were in, we filled the blocks with concrete. The reason for this is we never wanted any of the pond sides to sag or move. Then the fun began.

We had to make the concrete stick to a wall. There was a lot of trial and error before we got the right consistency for the concrete and the correct throwing form. Yes, I said throwing because that is the only way to make the first layer of concrete stick.

The trick we found is to make the first layer very rough by just throwing in on the wall and letting it dry. The rough surface made the next layer stick much better. It took two weekends to get the wall where the waterfall would be done. We made the waterfall by folding a sheet of expanded metal in half then securing to the wall with what else, concrete.

After all of the wall was covered we began to put a final coat of a concrete mixture then using a trowel and our hands we formed “rocks”. This process was very forgiving in that if we didn’t like the way it looked we could just add more concrete or carve away in the areas that had too much.

We laid some supporting wire material in the basin that would feed the waterfall then poured concrete in it and smoothed it with our hands. The sides were formed using the dirt that was taken out of the basin then we just poured concrete on it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the next four steps but it consisted of applying a sealing mix, splattering on a coat of rough texture to give it the feel of granite, painting it and sealing it.

After the concrete was installed. painted and sealed then it was time to install the liner. We went to the local carpet store and got pieces of carpeting to cushion the bottom and prevent any rocks from migrating up into the liner. We lined the entire bottom and the sides with carpet.

You can see the rocks in this picture all painted and sealed.  In a few months the color will soften and they will blend into the landscape better.

We unfolded the liner and let it sit in the sun for a couple of hours to soften.

Placing the liner in the pond was an event in itself due to the weight of it.  It took four of us to move it into place.

Once it was in place, we turned on the hose.  We needed to get a little water in it to align everything and press the liner into place before we would start to secure the edges.

The excitement was too much for me so after the edges were secure, I stayed up until late in the night filling the pond.

We left the pond full of water without any fish in it until the following summer. I put in plants and just enjoyed the sounds of the waterfall. We had put a clause in the closing paperwork for the house we sold that the fish were ours. The following March we went back to the old house we had sold and the owners were nice enough to give me my koi that had really outgrown the pond they were in.

We are still working on the rock wall around the back of the waterfall and I hope to get it finished next summer. It’s a lot of work and and I need to hire laborers to help mix and move the concrete. We also need to create the rock edging but that is on hold while we finish building my husband’s shop.

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