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• 2 Years Later

It's a Beginning

Everyone I talked to said that no matter how large my pond was, when I was done, I'd wish I'd made it bigger. So I used all the space I had. My choices were to buy the individual parts separately or to buy a kit. Since I'd never done this before and kits saved a considerable amount of money, I decided to get a kit: A Savio PP3000, the largest kit Savio makes. The brochure says it will build a pond 16'x21'x2'. The liner itself is 25'x20' but to compute the size you need, add twice the depth to both the length and width. I needed a pond that was 9'x21'x3+', which would have required a liner 15'x27'. So, I was a bit short. No problem, turn the liner at an angle so the diagonal corners pointed at the ends of my pond and I squeezed out the necessary length.

Before starting, I had an electrician install a GFI outlet near where the pump was going to be installed. It's covered by a planter canister in the extreme upper right of the picture to the left. Then it was time to dig. Because I am extremely stubborn and stupid (not necessarily in that order) I dug it all with pick and shovel by myself. My brother-in-law, Misha, lent me a roto-tiller which I used for a while, but it kept picking up rocks and locking up. It was more trouble to dig the stones out of the tiller blades than just to dig.

It took about six weeks working weekends to get it dug. In a lot of ways that was the most enjoyable part of the work. At least you could see huge progress from day to day.

One item that isn't obvious at first, but is important, is to make sure the edges of the pond are level. If you dig on a slope where the ground is lower on the left than on the right, when you fill the pond water will run out the left side. Sure, it's obvious when you say it, but I assure you it is easy to forget while digging to China. When I figured out I had a problem, I borrowed one of those laser levels and made sure I was OK. Had to make some corrections that wouldn't have been necessary had I paid attention from the beginning. In the picture on right, you can see that had I started filling the hole I initially dug with water, I'd have had a very wet patio and walkway. Incidentally, brooms and rakes don't make good levels. Get one of those laser jobs. Using the broom and rake with a good buble-level still left me about two inches off. The laser was far more precise.

Several people I talked to said that the pond needed to be at least 3' deep in order to protect the koi from predators, so I dug it out to a depth of 40". I cut some sides sloped and some square-cut. The square-cut sides allow plants to sit in approximately a foot of water, while the sloped sides were where the soil was loose and I was worried that it might cave in if I cut it vertically. In retrospect, this was a mistake. Now that everything is in, there is no way that any square-cut sides could cave in. Water pressure would prevent it. It's nice to have a sloped side where you feed the fish as it forces them to the surface, but I sure didn't need all the slopes I dug. The fish like to stay toward the bottom of the pond, so make the bottom as large as possible. The larger the swimming area, the larger the koi can grow. If the pond is large enough, they can reach 3' in length.

Some of the dirt from the hole was piled up at the end to create the mound for the waterfall. In retrospect, I carted too much dirt away into the corners of the yard and had to bring a lot of it back. The relatively small pile in the picture on left was nowhere near enough. The mound could even be a bit larger than it now is.