OK I have to make a confession.. This blog is at the moment a liitle behind hence being in the past tense…

So the wildlife pond is now finished ….

So how did I get to this point?

Firstly I needed to choose the site for the pond… I chose a spot on the right-hand side of the garden just behind the new beech hedge. Next was the shape, for this I just looped some string on the grass and moved the edges around until I found a shape that I liked.

I used an edging tool and cut around the shape of the string and then removed the turf. Looking back I think the turf removal was harder than digging the pond itself!!

Then I started to dig the hole. I did this over two half days with a little tweaking in the evenings after work.. The garden is on a slight slope so I had to build the back end of the pond. I placed a steak in the middle of the pond and from this I extended a long piece of baton out to the edges of the pond. On top of this I placed a level, this enabled me to build all sides of the pond to the same level.

The soil at various depths was very stony. I picked out all of the large stones but the more you picked the more you found. So after removing the largest I covered the inside of the pond with about an inch of sand. The sand was ordered from the local builders merchants at a cost of around £45, this included delivery( for a ton of sand).

I called upon the help of my friend Tom to help me laying the sand, underlay and liner. I’m glad I did as the morning started of with some gusty wind… We had fun holding down the underlay in preparation for the liner. But after some fun and games we had the underlay down and the liner on top ready for some water.
Ebay turned up trumps again for the cheapest place to buy the liner. The seller was also giving away free underlay with all liner so this was a saving of around £50.

I original decided base the pond measurements at around 4metres x 4metres and ordered liner and underlay for this size. This equated to a piece of liner 7metres x 7 meters. This was sufficient for a pond 4m x 4m x 1m deep. The liner cost came in at around £85 including delivery with the above mention free underlay worth £50.

We slowly filled the pond with water moving the liner around as needed.. After the pond was filled and left to settle for a whole we dug a trench all the way around the perimeter at about a spades width and tucked the liner into the trench. As this is As Cheap As Possible project I opted to bring the soil back up to the edge of the liner and seed all of the bare soil around the pond.

The pond ended up being around 3.5m x 3m and around 500mm deep… There will be no fish in this pond… it is purely for wildlife only so it didn’t need to be too deep but has nice easy sloping sides. I have also built a nice shallow cobbled / pebbled area at the front of the pond to enable none pond wildlife to have a drink. As you can see from the photographs although not quite wildlife our cat decided to christen the pond with the first tongue..

We visited the the local world of water centre and brought some marginal plants and importantly some oxygenating plants for the deeper part of the pond. The cobbles and the pebbles came from the local garden centre at a cost of around £20. I will list the pond plants and cost in my next blog entry as I intend to plant some grasses around edge of the pond so will include those details.