Building a Pond

Any serious wildlife gardener has to have a pond.  And anyway, where better to sit and take stock, look at the view, watch the dragonflies, and have a beer?

Our plot slopes, so we wanted to site the pond near the top of the hill, where the mountain views are least obscured.  When the house was built, a large drainage ditch was dug across the plot to take water away from the construction site.  As this naturally fills with water in wet weather, and is an already partially dug hole, it seemed like the obvious place to choose.

Although we are on very heavy clay, we decided to line the pond with an artificial liner, anyway.  We weren't quite sure how long a traditional clay-lined pond would last with the temperatures in the 30s and low 40s and no rain to keep the clay moist and water resistant!

The drainage ditch running east-west across the plot.

So the first stage was to back fill most of the drainage ditch, having first put in a perforated yellow plastic pipe, as we still get quite a lot of run-off from the fields above us.  We could then borrow a man with a digger, and excavate an approximation of the hole we wanted.

A couple of bucket scoops later and we have a big untidy hole in the ground.

Getting in and getting dirty was the only way to form shelves and shape the pond.  Glad to be on camera duty!

Once we were happy with the final shape - sloping sides and shelves at two different levels - the whole thing was lined with our own clay.

A thin layer of sand helped to even out the ridges and also gave a slightly slippery surface for fitting the underlay.

The pond liner came with a soft underlay to help avoid puncturing the plastic.  We suddenly realised how big the pond was!

And then the main liner goes in - strictly boots off for this bit.  The liner is made from low density polythene,  laminated with a UV and rot resistant layer on both sides.  It was remarkably flexible and easy to coerce into the corners.

The first bucket of water goes in.  The excess liner at the side is held down with rocks and, once the water level has been established - just in case we got the levels wrong - the edges would be tidied up.  The water all came from a couple of water butts down by the house.  Thank goodness it was a wet spring, as we were able to fill the pond in just a couple of back-breaking days!

All full.  There was enough spare liner to excavate a beach area to the front right which also has the overflow into the old ditch, and a wide shallow shelf on the left.

The wide shelf, on the right here, topped with gravel.  During July it did become dry as the water level dropped below the shelf, but birds and insects were often seen taking advantage of the safe access to water.  The sloping area of rocks and gravel, the beach, is top left in this shot.  And we have plants!  Plus turf cut from elsewhere in the garden, covering up the liner.  The pond is starting to blend into the grass around it.

After only a month, it is all looking well established.

Huge numbers of damsel flies have taken advantage, so hopefully there will be even more next year.

The plot came with an old tin bath, used as a water trough for the cattle that grazed the land before we built our house.  Dragonflies have laid eggs in this which has been really frustrating; they almost always perished in high summer as the water in the bath heated up.  Once the pond was ready, we relocated no less than 35 dragonfly larvae from the bath to the pond, and here is a successful hatching.

Tranquillity