My Front Garden Ponds
The first, and smaller of these two ponds, has been moved. Originally it was dug into a small hollow at the side of the house. After it had been put there my parents realised that they could not see it from inside the house and therefore it was in the wrong place. They removed the liner and filled the hole back in.....and so it was when I moved in.
I decided it would look nice in the front garden nestled between three pine trees, so I dug the hole and used the excavated material to make a flower bed at the back of the pond and a place to make a small stream and small waterfall.
This pond is only about four feet square and about two and a half feet deep. This is not the ideal depth for a pond in this climate as it should be no shallower than four feet to allow for a hard freeze in a bad winter. So far my only real problem was that mink found the pond during a thaw in the middle of January 2003 and decided to snack on the sleeping goldfish, wiping out the entire fish population at one go. This is but one of the costs of keeping a fish pond in a beautiful, yet rugged place like rural Newfoundland.
These three photos below can be enlarged by clicking on them.
After having one fish population wiped out I decided that I needed a deeper pond......but that was not the catalyst I needed to spur me on to dig my newest pond. My motivation came when I had spent a couple of weeks digging dandelions out of the front lawn......and after removing more than twelve wheelbarrows full of them and only having done half of the front lawn I was ready to try anything that would eliminate them completely! So I decided that the smaller the patch of grass we had the fewer the dandelions that would need to be dug and the easier it would be to maintain the lawn......I rented a mini excavator and started to dig !
This hole is four feet deep about twenty-five feet long and eight feet wide. I intended to dig it a couple of feet deeper and then make the pond of concrete..... As building here in Newfoundland is rampant right now I could not find a contractor with the time to do this concrete job for me, and even though I had four different companies come and look at it not one returned to me with a reasonable detailed quote on the job I wanted them to do. So I ended up doing what I did not want, that is putting in a liner. The reason I did not want to put in a liner is because of the great number of Moose that walk through our garden every year, only one needs to step into the pond and put his hoof through the liner to cause me great problems !
Anyway, the liner was installed, and the pond filled with rain water from our rain barrels. Goldfish were introduced to the pond in December ( we had such a mild winter at the end of 2003 that the pond was still liquid and I was therefore still able to work on it, which is very unusual for here ) The landscaping is being done in 2004. It just so happens that the photos below were taken after the first real snowfall of the winter of 2003/4.
The Garden is still progressing as I load these photos......but due to the fact that frost still threatens us here in Newfoundland well into the month of June, The garden could not be fully planted until the end of that month.