| Bill & Julia's Water Garden |
Step 2.
Our water garden is located in our backyard next to a small concrete patio, we wanted to be able to sit in the backyard or look out our dining room and be able to see the garden and hear the waterfall.
The next step after deciding where you are going to place your water garden is to determine what the shape is going to be. We first decided on a crescent shape, but then we ran into a small problem. Before I started to dig, I never called the utility companies to have them check for underground lines. Guess what, there was a telephone line at the bottom right hand side of the pond and yes I cut it, ( It looked like a tree root to me, until I seen the cooper wires) So lets start over, step 2 is call your local utility compaies and have them come out and check for lines, most areas don't charge anything for this service.
I used a can of orange spray paint to mark out the shape that I wanted, you can use a garden hose also. I dug out the inner hole first, to a depth of 30", the shelf is at a height of 16" deep. You can make the depth of your pond anything that you want, the reason that I chose 30" and 16" is because we live in the country and have raccoons that visit the pond and try and catch the fish, raccoons will not go into water that is over 16". Also the freeze line for water in Oklahoma is 24" this allows us to place our lilies at the bottom of the pond in the winter and they will not freeze.
This is a photo of the pond from another angle. I used the dirt from the hole to make my waterfall. I could have had the whole thing dug out in a day, but I had the small problem with the telephone line and that took two extra days to fix. Once you have your hole roughly cutout, take a 2" by 4" piece of wood that is the length of the pond and using a carpenters level make sure that the top and the shelfs are level. This will keep the water level even all the way around the pond.
