Munchy's Ponds

[Munchy2007]

A year ago this month, I decided that I wanted to upgrade my little wildlife pond and at the same time build another waterfall, something a bit bigger than I have on my raised pond.

So I got my garden fork and spade out of the shed, dug up some shrubs that were in the way of where I wanted it to go and then set about making a hole in the mixture of clay and flint that passes for soil around here.

It was quite hard work as you can probably imagine, but an afternoon's work saw most of the job done, and a bit more digging the next morning was enough to get the pre-formed pond in the ground.

The afternoon was spent, back filling and leveling the pond before filling it with water.
With that done, I decided to give my a back a rest and leave it for a couple of days to make sure it wasn't leaking anywhere.

Here's a few pictures I took at the time, more to come soon


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My supervisor, overseeing the project!

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Tired out from all that watching me digging!

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[fr499y]

Nice are you running an airline from the house?

[Munchy2007]

Nice are you running an airline from the house?

I've got a weatherproof RCD protected power point on the wall of the house next to my raised pond and a weatherproof box that houses various electrical bits for the ponds, including the air pumps. Both the electrical point and box are also under cover from the elements.

I've run the electric cable for the waterfall pump and pond airline through heavy duty plastic electrical conduit pipe from that box up to the pond. At the time those pictures were taken, I hadn't got as far as that, and I had just run a bit of standard aquarium airline from the air pump to the pond, for a bit of aeration while I was finishing things off.

I'll be replacing the canister filter that I have on my raised pond sometime in the next couple of weeks, and I'll post pictures on here of the whole setup when I do that.

[Munchy2007]

After a couple of days rest to recover from digging the hole for the new pond, I started work tidying up the surround by laying some rocks down around it and adding the pump, filter and waterfall.

The waterfall itself was preformed plastic which I surrounded with some pieces of rock to make it look a bit more natural. The rocks around the the pond edge were fixed in place using expanding pond foam as were some of the rocks around the waterfall and filter box.

The filter box is an All Pond Solutions BF-6000 and a Swell 2300LPH pump, so the pond is well filtered. I've wrapped the pump in coarse filter sponge to prevent tadpoles being sucked into the filter, which means I have to clean it off every 3-4 months to maintain flow. But the upside is, that acting a s a pre-filter it keeps the sponges in the filter box cleaner, so I don't need to clean them so often, which would be a bigger job than cleaning the sponges around the pump.

The air pump is a Tetra APS 150, which I find are by far the quietest air pumps I've ever used, I use them on my aquariums too and when inside the cabinet they can barely be heard. I still hadn't got around to changing the airline tube as it hadn't been delivered, but I use this type of airline for the ponds, because not only is it long lasting, but being weighted it also sinks to the bottom of the pond, so it looks tidier and don't have to weight the air stone down.

At this stage I still needed to finish hiding the filter box and tidy up the surrounding area, but it was starting to come together.


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[Sarah]

Looks great

[Munchy2007]

Looks great

Thanks Sarah

[Munchy2007]

A few more pictures of the wildlife pond and waterfall as I continued adding to it and from later in the summer once the plants had grown a bit.


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[Munchy2007]

This one was from a bit earlier this year when the weather was a bit nippy for a few days.

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Now the weather is starting to warm up a little bit, things are starting to grow again. Sometime soon I'll replace all the alpines that got killed off over the winter by the unexpected harsh temperatures.

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[VikingMummy2015]

Images aren’t all showing up for me (bar the last post). Can I ask which preform you went for? I have horrible ground (heavy clay soil with areas of gravel the previous tenant turfed over) so digging is going to be a pain. Want to be sure I get a decent preform with all the effort it’ll be!