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The Pond: Just a Little Fish Pool
(Mom's version)

Lots of nice people have written to ask for details about the actual construction of the pond. The last time mom answered one of these notes, she said "you know, we ought to cut-and-paste this answer into another Chronicle", so here it is:

You may want to take this "advice" with a grain of salt: I remember hoping that none of the neighbors whose windows overlook our garden was a real bricklayer, because I sure didn't know what I was doing! This is what worked for me; it's by no means the only way to go about this, and certainly not anything like the best.

I started thinking seriously about doing this in July of 1995. As Wynnie has already mentioned, it was all Henry Mitchell's fault. If you haven't read "One Man's Garden", or "The Essential Earthman", do yourself a favor - but don't say you weren't warned! I had put a little round flower bed in the center of the back yard (it wasn't really a garden yet), and there was a tiny bird bath in the center of it. Every time I looked at it, Henry Mitchell whispered in my ear how charming a little fish pool would be. I certainly never intended to put an 8-foot pond in the middle of a small town garden, but these little projects have a way of getting out of hand.

September 1995: Beginning to Dig

Obviously, the first step was to dig a hole. After breaking both my shovel and my spade, I finally wised up and bought a pick axe. The "soil" in this part of Cleveland is rock-hard clay, and to make things even more interesting, after I got about a foot down I discovered not the shale that I was expecting, but old plates, dishes, railroad spikes and bromo-seltzer bottles. I was delayed for two whole days when I chopped through an inch-thick section of heavy electrical cable and had to call the electric company to come back out and take a look at it. Turned out it was only a six-inch long piece of cable buried along with all that junk, but who knew?

When I wasn't digging, I was reading something less inspiring than Henry Mitchell, but far more practical: a book called "Ponds & Water Gardens", by Bill Heritage. Bill Heritage makes it very clear that beginning cautiously with a "sensible" small pond is certain to lead to disappointment. He recommends that in order to attain a self-sustaining ecological balance, less temperature fluctuation, and a more stable environment for the fish, a pond needs to have least 50 square feet of surface area. But that meant it was going to have to be 8 feet in diameter! I had the fever, though, and I was determined to do it right. It took me so many weeks to dig this hole and figure out what to do with the soil that by the time I'd finished, it was already snowing.

November 1995: Still More Digging

Once the pond itself was dug, I dug a shallow trench around the perimeter of the pond to accommodate a row of trapezoid-shaped cinder blocks. This base of blocks is half underground and half above; this keeps the pond water in the pond and the ground water in the ground. If your pond is surrounded by grass, and if you use chemical herbicides or fertilizers on that grass, this is a must; herbicides and fertilizers are equally bad for the inhabitants of a garden pond. Our garden has neither grass nor chemicals, but the base sure makes a dandy place to put your feet up!

At this point, though, sitting around the pond with our feet up was still a long way off. The next step was to lay the lining. I had bought a flexible liner - the very best I could find, guaranteed for 50 years. The books tell you to line the hole with sand before putting a liner down, but sand costs money around here, and the liner had just about used up my meager budget. After all that hard work I wasn't about to take any chances, though, so I scrounged a huge piece of carpeting that a neighbor had left out for the trash. I lined the hole with the carpeting and then spread out the liner. Once I finally got it all smoothed out, I filled it up, and then went inside to spend the winter reading about bricks and mortar.

It looked awful all winter long, a big round ice cube eight feet in diameter with the liner sitting there all exposed, but I'm convinced that the timing which forced me to leave it alone for five long months that winter also allowed the pond to "cure". By the time it thawed and warmed up enough so that I could consider adding lilies and fish, it had become a nice little well-balanced ecosystem.

April 1996: Bricks & Mortar

In April, I talked Murf and Wynnie into helping me haul home the bricks to edge the pond. As usual Wynnie was more than willing. Murf had her doubts about my sanity at this point, but was a real sport about it. Over the winter I'd thought hard about how to keep the liner under the water level, and finally ended up adding an extra row of bricks and doing some exotic over-and-under folding maneuver, which I've since seen clearly detailed in several water gardening books. Not a particularly elegant solution, but it seems to have done the job; it holds water and it doesn't show.

I will spare you the saga of the fountain - don't want to scare you. A word to the wise, though: do the electrical work first. We ended up having to rewire the entire garage, which involved digging a trench from the house to the garage, and from the garage to the pond. What a mess! And I'm sure you don't need to be reminded that unless you're a professional electrician, it's a good idea to pay one to do any outside electrical work. The sound of splashing water on a hot day in August is well worth it.

If you're about to embark on a similar project, the best advice I can offer is this: you'll be so much happier with the results if you get as much information as you can before you start. Look into your local zoning regulations (just call City Hall); read books; check out the Internet Pond Society; talk to people who've done it and find out how they're going to do their next pond! If you don't know anybody with a pond, there are literally hundreds of web sites in the internet pond society web ring. When you have specific questions, or need more precise advice, you'll want to drop in on the lively discussion at the usenet newsgroup rec.ponds. If you're too bashful to ask, check out their FAQ, which probably has most of the answers to your questions, anyway.

And you will find precise advice! If you haven't already noticed, this pastime seems to attract lots of retired or wannabe engineers, so you'll find many, many detailed schematics and "this-is-the-only-correct-way-to do-it" type instructions. I'm more laid back than most, but the only non-negotiable rule I'd suggest is to make sure your pond is absolutely level, because it's one thing you can't go back and fix without starting from scratch. Buy a spirit level and use it. I'm also pretty opinionated about staying away from chemicals and electronic gizmos (except for the fountain), but if you want to spend your time and money dosing sick fish and zapping harmless algae, knock yourself out!

Henry Mitchell was right, as usual: "a fish pool with water lilies gives the gardener greater returns for less labor than anything else". Go forth and dig!

The Roses...