Making a Wildlife Pond

NervousYetFeisty

We're moving soon to a house with a garden (hooray!).

I really, really want a wildlife pond. I'm almost as excited about this as I am about the house

I've looked at lots of websites about this, but would love to hear from anyone on here who has made a pond themselves. How much did it cost? How much work did it involve? Any moneysaving tips to pass on?


The garden is medium sized and on a fairly steep slope, btw...

alanobrien

I must have built half a dozen or so in my time.
In fact it was the second thing we did in the new house we moved into last year.

My last one was a wild life pond, this one is formal to reflect the "designer" garden the last owner established. Not finished it yet but expect to within a few months.

Anyway, cost will definately depend on size and if you want to have a half decent wildlife pond in balance then the bigger the better. Ideally i would not go below 1000 gallons and it needs to be at least 18" deep.

Also it will need to be at ground level or close to it so that the frogs, etc can come and go. I would add a small ramp
or shallow for them and the odd hedgehog that may find its way in.

A liner pond is the cheapest and has the advantage that you can make any shape you like. Fill under the liner with sand or old carpet to stop and stones or roots puncturing it. I have first hand experience of this and its a pain to fix.

Buy the liner from an online source, there are lots of them and they are much cheaper than local aquatic shops. get plants from ebay shops, they are cheap and plentiful.

I have 2 boys now 6 and 3 so safety is an issue, if it is for you here is what i do.

I go to the local gibbs and dandy or wickes etc and buy a
concrete reinforcement steel grid, they are about 4m x 3m wide with about 4"squares they cost about £15. I cut it to the shape of the pond with a grinder then paint it with hammerite then cover the pond with it. Actually i also add a fine net but its not totally necessary. It serves as a safety barrier and it works, i even walked across one once but wouldnt advise it !

If you want fish remember oxygen is an issue and lots of plants will deplete the oxygen in the water so you may need to pump and filter the water. That's a whole new subject.

Good luck with the project.

dragonsoup

I am on my second. One end is a very shallow beach area which is extremely popular with the local sparrows as a bath. I have counted 10 bathing at once!

We "borrowed" a bucket of water from an established pool from a friend and very quickly we had various weird larvae etc in the water. In fact it's coming up to it's first anniversary and looks as if it's been there much longer. No newts yet though. We had them in the last pond and I would love another breeding colony.

If you have space make a bog garden. We dug a second hole around the edge of the pool and extended the liner over and into this space. You need to fill it with sifted soil to remove the stones and the liner stops the water escaping so you have a mini bog. The frogs and toads love it and most garden centres have plants which like bogs ( or pinch some from a friend like I did!).

Edited to add we used an old carpet to make an underliner to go under the vinyl rather than buying the proper stuff

justin138

30 frogs and toads, and about 50 newts in our 9 foot round shallow pond today - loads of spawn/eggs. I know how excited you must be, but they are costly to install and take time and effort to keep clean (about once a year). We used old carpet to line ours too. Like Dragonsoup, we also begged a bucket of water and some plants from an established ponder. Beware of bringing in duck weed (lemna) with any plant - it'll take over and it's the devil to get rid of. We have hedgehogs drinking from the VERY shallow stony area - that's great to see every night too, but make sure they can't drown - they're swimmers but need to be able to climb out someplace shallow.

Hope this helps (I'm an avid pondy!)
Jo

totalguitar

How about some photos from established ponds ?

madmoys

A couple of years ago I sunk an old washing up bowl
into the ground (the rim at ground level)
put some small rocks to make a slope in case anything
fell in. I've seen hedgehogs and birds drinking from it,
and last year two small frogs sitting on the rocks !!!!!

NervousYetFeisty

I like the idea of the washing up bowl, reckon I could manage that
I'll probably have something like that nearer the house (so we can see it easily) for the birds.
I also love the idea of a shallow beach area for hedgehogs etc, and also to allow access to the pond for dipping - I want a bog area partly as I really like the kind of plants you can grow in an area like that, but if I had it all the way around we wouldn't be able to get to the water as easily. Also the bottom of the garden is a bit damp so it would be ideal I'd think for marshy/boggy plants.
The safety thing is a bit of an issue as we have a five year old. Some people would rather not have a pond at all because of this but I think the prospect of frogs outweighs this at his age. If we have another child then yes, I'd want to put a grid over it so thank you alanobrien. I think we might also put the pond toward the end of the garden, in an area that we might fence off at some point - a little beyond the garden is a brook and I'm quite nervous about our boy exploring down there as the banks are steep.

NervousYetFeisty

Having said that our boy is big enough not to worry about too much, when it comes to having a pond...
I've been reading the stats and it seems that children are most likely to drown in other people's ponds - not their own. So perhaps we'll get a grid anyway.

The largest percentage (39%) drowned in a neighbour’s pond after wandering away from their own home or the home of the people they were visiting.

Source: http://www.dti.gov.uk/homesafetynetwork/dw_stats.htm

twink

i have a small wildlife pond too, can anyone tell me the best time to renew liner went to do it yesterday but found five frogs in there spring is late here so no spawn yet, doesnt seem to matter when i go to do it there always seems to be frogs in there, do they hibernate in the mud at the bottom?

Wendrie

We didn't bother with a liner for our latest pond - but we're on London clay and they lined canals and used this stuff to make pottery so it doesn't lose much <G>

There are various websites and books (Chris Baines' Wildlife garden book is my favourite) http://www.beautifulbritain.co.uk/htm/pond/pond_pages.htm has some information and you can buy lots of plants from https://www.wigglywigglers.com and they have pond building advice as well. pond making hope that works - otherwise under life click on ponds <G>

Love having the bit of water - we also dug out another shallower bit for a bog garden, although a lot of this garden wants to be a bog garden for most of the year.... <sigh>