If You are New to Garden Ponds
New to Garden Ponds?
New to the Backyard Pond? Don’t Worry Get a Mini Pond Kit
The backyard pond can be a great asset to your home and a wonderful hobby to fill your free time. If you have a pond that’s doing well it will certainly increase the value of your home, because buyers love extras. Of course there’s no way you’d want to lose your pond once you got started, so you better decide if you’re in the house you want to be in for the rest of your life. Anyway being new to the idea of having and creating your own backyard pond you may not be familiar with the process of digging out the pond and buying all the materials needed to make it work, nor would you be looking forward to it. There’s a lot of materials involved, so that’s a lot of stuff to track down. Of course once you have the pond in there’s a minimal amount of items to buy, like fish and fish food, if and when you feel like it.
The mini pond kit is a good way for the doing it yourself pond owner to get started with the hobby. The kit should, no let’s rephrase that; a good pond kit will come with everything you need for that pond except, fish, plants and food. It will include the underlayerment, the liner, the skimmer, pump, a water feature, some sort of filter, all plumbing and piping, and the foam and glue to seal it with, and even dried beneficial bacteria. The bacteria will usually accompany some lava rocks on which they will be comfortable growing on. There’s probably a few other items that will vary from kit to kit, such as pond lighting.
Those are the basics. What you need to do is shape and dig out your hole. Do get the kit before you dig, so you know how big a pond your kit is meant for. You should be able to design your pond in any shape you wish, because of the miracle of EPDM. This is the liner for the pond, it’s a plastic polymer that basically comes in a flexible sheet, like tarp but not tarp. Don’t attempt to use a piece of tent tarp as the liner in effort to cut corners.
Once the pond is in you will need to buy some sort of edging to cover up the excess liner and make your pond look nice in general. Many people prefer to use flat limestone bedrocks placed around the edge of the pond. They are heavy enough to stay in place, but if you like you can tamp some dirt in the spaces between the rocks.
After the pond is filled you should wait a couple of weeks for the tap water to dechlorinate and dechloraminate before getting aquatic life. Those are chemicals found in the drinking water that can harm fish. Your kit may come with a couple chemical removers which will hasten the process so you can add fish and other life faster. Then all you need to do is get acquainted with your pond and keep up the regular maintenance.