#Thegreatpoolpondconversion
Our house sits on an acre. One half acre used to be a horse turnout / pasture. We discussed for years digging a pond out there but we couldnt get to step one with permits, rules and regs, etc. So we gave it up a couple of years ago.
Projects are hard to schedule in anyone’s busy life. Grand scale ones are just…wow.
This idea came relatively quickly out of nowhere and just took over.
Mrs DM realized we hadnt actually used our swimming pool in the last two years and still the pool guy comes every single week. She read something online about turning your pool into a vegetable garden. I thought it was loony because if we were willing to do all that gardening (forget the conversion), well we had a half acre just waiting!
About a half hour later I had the ‘aha’ moment and walked into her office with a big grin. “You know what we *could* do? We could turn it into a wildlife pond.”
I spend a week poking around the internet when i shoulda been ‘taxing’, and determined it was a viable idea and if approached correctly, something that us two 61 year olds could probably do ourselves. Saw some good projects other people had done. And then i really got the bug. Right in the middle of tax season i got obsessed and started mapping the whole thing out. It exploded into 88 documents, spreadsheets, timelines, budgets, methods, sources, oh and the rabbit holes. Measurements, estimates, liners, pumps, plants, fish, good rocks and bad, to filter or not to filter, construction techniques so we could do the work ourselves. (I’ve worked it out so nothing weighs over 40-50 pounds. Still, oh yes, we’ll get manual labor if we need it.)
Within a month we had all the bases covered and a workable plan (so we hope).
So, again in the midst of tax season and prepping for the 50k monstrosity run (thankfully now over), we did the first few token steps to make it official and now there’s no backing out. (we power washed the deck, cancelled the pool guy, bought a sump pump and Caution! tape) We have at least one source for everything and we’re still working on some better sources if there are deals to be had.
Here’s the starting point. The house is just off to the left.
In addition to shoveling and driving the lawn tractor with dump cart, Mrs DM will document it all as we go.
Between the two palms at the other end will be a raised ‘pool’ that waterfalls back into the main pond fed by a solar powered bilge pump.
This is another guy’s conversion:
It’s a very rough idea what ours might end up like, though our design is non precision. No clay models or anything like that. Our pool is bigger and we won’t have plantings right on the perimeter because our pool is already amoeba shaped. We tried to contact him but the site where his story is posted lost touch with him.
The idea is to drain the pool, level the floor with dirt, then build two levels of ‘shelves’ around and along the pool walls with dirt filled sandbags (maybe 4-500 of them) and backfilled with more dirt - about 40 yards total.
Then it gets covered with a large rubber liner and might look like this (same guy):
Then we ‘seascape’ it with rock and plants that live in gravel pots. Up to this point should probably take 6 months.
Then we fill it, add floating plants and wait a couple of months before introducing some ‘canary’ fish. Ours will be non filtered and non circulating (no maintenance), except for the small waterfall. So it’s all about the right plants, the right fish and the right amounts of both.
While we’re waiting we’ll stain the deck, redo the two flower beds with low wooden fences/cribs, build two other fences (you cant see) to screen in the a/c and trash cans, etc. Then we plant butterfly weeds, firespike and jasmines, add bird feeders, perches, houses, and finally we tie it into the open field with some more trees out there, more bird houses and a walking path.
It’s ambitious and exciting, and we can’t wait to really get started.
as always, more to come…