How to get rid of a garden pond

CitizenBidet

You may not realise it but you're very lucky to have a pond. Frogs and all the other wildlife your pond will attract are getting much rarer now through loss of habitat. Gardens like yours are fast becoming the last little oasis for much of our countrys wildlife.
You can read more about creating a space for wildlife at the BBC website here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/wildbritain/gardenwildlife/

lauren565

Hi all,
we have a very large pond in our back garden. My daughter who is nearly 2 fell over the side this morning and scratched all her face. that is it the pond is going. We have 4 kids and its just too dangerous. It is fenced off but this doesnt stop the children climbing. The garden is quite small and it takes up the whole space with no where for the children to play. It is very big about 12 foot by 8 foot, and is made of cement. Very deep. Full of very large fish including goldfish and koi carp. The pond was already here when we moved into this house. Please can anyone advise how to get rid of it? I would idealy like to have a flat cemented surface for the children to be able to play on their bikes, etc. I have about £500 savings that I will happily spend on this if it ensures the children will be safe. Any advise please???? !
Thank you so much !
Lauren


PS I DID GOOGLE IT BUT NOTHING CAME UP, HENCE ON HERE !

emmahip

Sorry to hear your pond is causing you such problems.

I guess how you fill it in is affected by what you put in it's place. Personally I would turn it into a flower border, as long as you crack the cement for drainage and put a good few inches of gravel at the bottom you can then fill up the rest with compost/topsoil. If the cement is too thick to crack easily you could grow moisture loving plants like ferns.

Whatever you decide please find a home for the fish first. It's a long way to Nottinghamshire for me but I'm sure you'd have lots of other takers.

DKLS

Sad to hear that another pond is being lost, but if the kids cant stay away, you must do what feels right.
You can advertise the fish for free on here
And if your wanting to concrete over, put a request on freecycle for some hardcore, jump on that a lot, then lay your concrete.

lauren565

thanks ive put an ad on that fish website (i dont even know many of the fish names!!!!) and will put a request on freecycle. thank you. The pond is actually much bigger than i thought - i measured it and its 13 foot by 9 foot. A big chunk of the garden gone. Thanks for your advise, really appreciated.

Davesnave

Personally I think it's important to allow kids to fall into ponds. Having had a death in my extended family from this cause, I was careful to let both my daughters have a supervised 'accident' at an early age. They only do it once! Once you allow kids to challenge your warnings by burning themselves (radiators not matches!) falling into ponds etc, they tend to believe you about other things too, like not assuming all plants are edible and so on -quite important if you have aquilegia, foxgloves or the dreaded aconitum.

Anyway, to deal with your question, you will need to pump out the water with an electric pump you can get from a tool hire centre. Try to get a decent sized one as they block easily and need supervision, so a faster model will be less tedious. Once the pond is empty, someone handy with a sledgehammer will probably render it less than watertight in around ten minutes. If you are just going to fill it in, that should be enough.

Your next job will be to find someone local doing building work who could use your pond as a skip. Make sure they undrstand they can only put rubble in there. It will take some time for the rubble to bed down and you might need to finish off with a maxi bag of hoggin (mix of shale, sand & clay used by builders prior to concreting. Good builders yards will deliver in 1 tonne bags.

Finally when you have a compacted levelish surface, you could concrete over or maybe fill the remaining hole with play bark, depending on the habits of the local cat population!

Bear in mind that if you have filled a blooming great hole with rubble etc & created a large patio play area, it may be very hard to change it later. Another solution might be to get a builder/handyman to quote for decking over the pond.

bethsdad

We moved into a new house a couple of months ago, which has a pond in the back garden. This won't mix well with a 22-month old toddler, so I am looking to fill it in.

What is the best way to go about it? Presumably I drain it, and take the lining out, but what do I fill it with? After it's gone I want to use some of the space for lawn and some for part of the veg patch. Don't want to fill it all with topsoil, because that will be quite expensive I reckon.

Also, how do I know how much soil (or whatever) to get? The pond is about 10ft x 5 ft and is up to about 2-3ft deep in parts.

nodwah

That sound pretty big to me.

have you asked on freecycle for any soil - it will still be a pain to transport it all tho.

stilernin

I need to fill a pond in too, so will be watching this with interest.

Have you noticed any higher ground in your garden I wonder? When the pond was dug, the soil might have been piled somewhere rather than spread thinly over the whole garden. I think I might have spotted where some soil was stacked, but no doubt I'll need extra aswell.

Have you thought of keeping an eye on Freecycle? I often see paving slabs or bricks offered. These could be put at the very bottom of the hole to take up some space. Top soil is also offered some times. Someone might even be digging out a pond!

Best of luck with it though, I'm sure it will take far more to fill these flippin' ponds than we think.....................