OK, here's a bit more on this project.
First, the surroundings... The pond will take up the center of the back yard, while its various filtration bits, waterfalls, overflow streams, etc. will extend all over the garden. The viewing area is our back patio, which is where I tend to spend most of my time. Weather permitting, I move my home office out onto the patio as well.
So here's the view from the patio looking south:
The pond will be just the right of the porch pillar. Where the chair and pots are sitting will be an intake bay and pump vault (all DIY).
And here is the view looking toward the other side of the patio:
So if you're sitting at the little table in the above photo, you're looking out towards the southwest corner of the garden, where the stream and waterfall will be.
All well and good, but there were a few problems. First, the area where the stream was to go actually started out being the lowest part of the garden! My goal was to use spoil from the pond to build it up so that it would be about half a meter above the point where water enters the pond. And of course, that point itself also needed to be built up, as did the west side of the pond, which started out considerably lower than the east side...
So my first job was to pull the top soil off the pond and use it to build up the west side of the pond. Why top soil? Because this area will later be planted, and I wanted to preserve every cm of fertile soil for that. The subsoil would later go toward building up the stream bed in the southwest corner. In each of the photos that follow, you'll see the stream area gradually rising, until it's at the level of the retaining wall (which is now in danger of collapsing down the hillside due to the weight of soil, but that's a different issue).
But first, there were two other problems that had to be dealt with: two of the trees that I had planted some ten years ago had been pushed over by the prevailing winds. In the years after I planted them, I had been dealing with some health issues, and had really let the garden go. But now what?
Here is how things looked as I started work in early November of last year:
Here you can see the point just to the left of the leaning tree where the water will enter the pond. At this point in the dig, this area was still much lower than where the water level would eventually be, so a lot of work was needed to raise the grade. But first, what to do about that tree?!
I first tried using a pulley tied to a sturdy tree to the right of it to straighten it out (hence the ropes visible in the photo) but to no avail. So I bought a hand winch (aka a "come-along"). I wrapped up the tree in underlayment from my old pond, put a 2x4 along the far side to keep the ropes from digging into the bark, and trussed the come-along up to a sturdy tree, and....
Success! It took a fair bit of work, over a period of several days to allow the tree to settle in the new position after pulling. But it worked!
The same process was repeated for the lime tree, that was also leaning way into the pond. In the photo below, you can see the progress as of the middle of November. The lime tree was similarly trussed up and straightened, various paving slabs were dug out of the old pond and moved over to my staging area with the hand truck, and digging in earnest was ready to commence!
Now one problem I encountered early on is the soil...or rather, the lack of it! Once I'd dug down 20 cm, I met gravel. From there on down, it was all or nothing: there was no way to form shelves at all.
So while I was able to cut away the topsoil to allow the placement of edging stones, the shelves inside the pond will need to be built using cinderblock or something similar. Fortunately, in one of my construction dump sorties, I scrounged some pieces of an old concrete pipe (visible in the photos above). These will be helpful for shelf building along the south wall.
Not everyone was happy with the pond progress however... As I removed the first layer of stones, the wildlife living beneath the stones had to be rehomed. That included about one scorpion per rock...
And then I had a stroke of luck! A friend who is in construction loaned me his jackhammer for a day. Yeeehawww!
The scorpions were
not amused.
Sadly, I had to give it back to him the next day, but it was fun while it lasted!
And so things progressed... By the end of January, the stream area had risen to the top of the retaining wall and the entry point was nearly at the high water mark.
Meanwhile, the deep end of the pond was 60 cm below the high water mark. The goal was for this area to be 80-90cm deep and 2 meters in diameter -- just right for wading into on a hot summer day. My cat, Nissa helped with the dig...
But the rainy season was coming on, and work was slowing down. And then the first real storm hit, and I got a preview of what the pond would look like with some water in it!
Once the water had receded, I sent out a dove...
Ooops! Wrong story...
I got to work on widening the deep end and deepening the intake bay...
In the above photo, you can also see some rocks that may end up being used for the spillway and frame rocks. The crowbar across the top of the rock marks the eventual water level, so the stream still needs to be raised a bit.
And that's where it stands at the moment: I'm widening the deep zone, creating steps so that it will be safe to move around in the pond, and getting ready to knock out the wall of the intake bay so that I can dig it out (impossible to dig down in this (non)soil; you have to pickaxe it from the side.
Oh, and there's the matter of the huge boulder at the bottom of the deep end... But that is a story for another day!
