It’s been a few years since I got the idea that I wanted a pond in my garden. But I’ve procrastinated, making excuses every year for why it wasn’t going to happen: I’m too old to dig it myself, it’ll be too expensive to pay someone else to install a pond, maybe it’ll add too much maintenance work to my garden. Every year I’ve been getting increasingly irritated at myself for being so indecisive. Recently, quite out of the blue, things happened that finally propelled me forward. I was inspired by someone else sharing photos of a weekend pond project in her yard, and I thought it didn’t look all that difficult. (I blissfully ignored the fact that she’s about 30 years younger than me and had her husband helping her, and was using a smaller preformed pond.) I think the fact that I have another birthday coming up in a couple weeks was another factor that put me in the right frame of mind to do this — I didn’t want to age one more year without a pond!

The last thing that contributed to my willingness to dive into this big project is that I was on a one-week course of oral steroids for a thumb injury, so I figured the steroids would help minimize any pain I might feel from some heavy manual labor. Ha, genius, I tell you!

I chose a location for the pond between two of my native garden beds. I’d like to say a quick word about the lawn in these photos, lest you judge me harshly. First of all, we went more than three weeks without a drop of rain, so everything is brown. But I also have lots of crabgrass and other weeds in the back yard because I refuse to use chemicals to encourage a “lush” lawn. My goal is to eliminate as much lawn as I can and replace it with habitat that supports more biodiversity. In the meantime, I’m tolerating some ugliness. So please disregard the grass and focus on the lovely new pond and all the wildlife it’s sure to bring to my garden!

So on a Friday I went to the pond garden store where I bought the materials they said I would need according to my intended measurements: felt underlayment, 45 mil liner, and a 3/4-ton pallet of stones. I drove home from there and immediately got to work digging, afraid that I might lose my momentum with any further delay. Here I show a series of photos of the process.

I used spray paint to mark out the digging zones. The outer circle would be the perimeter of the pond, and the inside circle would be the one-foot-deep planting shelf. The advice I got from the pond store was to remove the sod around the edges first, to make a shallow bed for the edging rocks to sit in. This next photo shows that done, and a new smaller circle marked inside for the two-foot deep center portion of the pond.

I thought it would be easiest to dig the deep inner portion first, and then I could more easily dig the shallower planting shelf. So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m lucky that my soil is Oak Openings sand, and very easy to dig. I got slowed down by some roots, but overall, the digging was the easiest part of this project. And the first day was nice and cool with a breeze, so that helped keep me comfortable.

The next day I finished the digging, and saw my first pond visitor even before there was any water in it. A chipmunk ran down in the hole and out the other side, just checking out the fresh dirt, I suppose.

This was the end of day two, with all digging done. It’s nine feet long and five feet wide, and two feet deep in the middle. I still needed to do some cleanup and leveling of the various edges, but that was planned for Sunday, day three.

On Sunday I found that the sand kept collapsing as I tried to firm up the edges and check for any roots that I’d missed. It’s important to make sure there aren’t any sharp objects that can pierce the (expensive) liner. So I sprayed the soil with a light mist of water and that fixed the problem so I could firm things up. At this point I was so motivated that having to wait for the rocks was frustrating. They’d told me the rock delivery would be the following week, but they weren’t sure when. As it turned out, they delivered the rocks that same day, even though it was a holiday (Father’s Day — and yes, I took a break to talk to my Dad).

I should mention here that, thanks to the steroids, I was feeling absolutely no pain after all the digging. And I felt almost superhuman, like I could do this every day. It’s a good thing I can’t get my hands on those pills without a prescription because I might be tempted to take them whenever I have a big project. Now that I’ve finished the six-day course of steroids, I’ve come crashing down and am having some pain again. But anyway, back to the project.

Here’s where they left 1500 pounds of rocks. I used my wheelbarrow to take them to the far side of the back yard, about 80 pounds at a time. The tires on the wheelbarrow went almost flat if I put much more weight in it, so I had to make a lot of trips back and forth. This part was definitely not fun, but I finished it in about two hours. I realized that I couldn’t leave those rocks out there overnight without risking them being stolen, so I had no choice but to keep moving them.

I’d been advised to clean each rock so they wouldn’t muck up the pond, so I spread them out in the yard and got to work. This was messy, hard, tedious work.

The next morning my friend Kate came over to help me lift the heavy pond liner and drop it down into the hole. And at that point I was ready to start laying rocks. I spent all day Monday hosing dirt off of individual rocks and finding appropriate placement for them. One tricky part of this was making sure the liner was folded up behind the backs of the rocks so that soil wouldn’t wash into the pond. I worked my way slowly around the perimeter, cutting away excess liner as I placed rocks.

Tuesday I finished placing most of the rocks and filled the pond with water and a few plants. As a last-minute addition, I made a small planting bed on one side of the pond. I had a lot of leftover rocks, and I was trying to think of other ways to use them up. Luckily I also had a new shrub bed on the other side of the yard that was just begging for a flagstone border, so I used a lot of them there. Here’s the mostly-finished pond with the solar fountain trying to function on a cloudy day.

Isn’t it wonderful?! I’m in love with it, and the feeling of having done it myself is priceless. I may never leave my garden again. The birds started drinking from it immediately, even though there’s a birdbath right beside it. Notice how I anchored the floating fountain inside the potted rush in the middle; when I allowed it to float around, it would constantly bump up against one side and spray water outside the pond. I realized that wouldn’t be a good way to keep the water bill down so I came up with this pretty good solution.

One thing I found when researching wildlife pond installations on YouTube was that most of the videos seemed to be from the UK rather than the US. And when I talked to the staff at our local pond nursery, they kept assuming I was going to have a waterfall, pump, and filtration unit; they seemed confused by my idea of a wildlife pond. Apparently most Americans prefer to put fish in their ponds, requiring pumps and mechanical filtration. If I’ve done my research properly, my fishless pond water will be filtered adequately by the plants, along with added beneficial bacteria occasionally (I still have to read more about that). I’ll do regular skimming of floating debris to help keep it clean, and I know I’ll have to do more intense cleaning of the pond periodically, depending on how quickly it gets gunked up.

Here’s the UK video that gave me the confidence to move forward:

One thing that caused me some confusion in my research was coming across one video from a pond company that said that adding rocks to your pond was a MAJOR mistake because it increased the difficulty of keeping it clean. But that idea got a lot of pushback in the comments, and most other instructional videos do include rocks in the ponds. I haven’t done it yet, but I think I’m going to add some medium-sized river rocks to the bottom of my pond. I don’t like looking at a plain black liner under the water, and I think rocks would give so much more interest and provide places for aquatic critters to live. And since my pond is relatively small, I can easily pull rocks out to clean them if necessary.

I still have a lot to learn about managing my pond, but I already know how to enjoy it! The birds are drinking from it, and there have been a couple wasps doing thorough inspection of the nooks and crannies in the rock border. And a couple dragonflies have dipped down to take a look too! I based my pond measurements on the recommendations of the Migratory Dragonfly Partnership (MDP) for a pond to support the dragonfly life cycle. Part of those requirements were to have a surface area of at least 43 square feet, and a total vegetation cover of 50-70%. Note that the website of the MDP was maintained by the Xerces Society and it seems to be gone now. I’ve messaged them to find out what happened to the wonderful resources they had there. Luckily I’d already downloaded their pond guidelines several years ago.

I’ll be adding more plants, and some mosquito dunks to prevent those nasty buggers. But I want to take a few days to rest and enjoy it now, and those things can be done on the next rainy day. If you’ve ever had any interest in having a pond in your yard, I highly recommend that you consider a natural wildlife pond like mine. It has already changed the way I feel about my property. I’ve been building habitat with native plants for five years, and with the addition of this fresh water source, I’ve got an even more productive slice of habitat on my urban lot. I can’t wait to see who shows up to live here with me!

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Resources:

In planning my pond I consulted a document called “Dragonfly Pond Guidelines” from the Migratory Dragonfly Partnership. Their project has been discontinued for lack of funding and the website has been taken down, but they’ve given me permission to share this document with you. It’s 28 pages long, authored by Celeste Mazzacano, Dennis Paulson, and John Abbott.