Building A Pond For Your Garden

Basically, the first step in building a pond is to figure out where you want it and dig a hole. The size should be proportional to your garden. You will need to get a liner for the pond - this can be a prefabricated fiberglass piece or you can go free form and make your own with rubber roofing material or equivalent.

If you are planning to put fish in your pond, you should make sure that it is deeper than the frost line so that the fish have somewhere to go when the pond freezes over. You could also consider a heater for the pond to keep it from freezing.

Like keeping an aquarium, building a pond requires some thought to filtering wastes. The bigger the water area is, the better it will be able to handle fish wastes and such. You should always provide some sort of substrate or gravel on the bottom so that a bacteria bed can build up which will help to keep the water in good quality. You will also need a filter to keep the water from turning totally gross. You can buy these at fish stores and you can also make your own (Sorry, I can't advise you on how to do that!).

If you are building a pond in order to keep Koi or other fish, you need to wait until the filter is in place before you add the fish. Like a fish tank, you should add them 1 at a time and let the bacteria build up enough to handle the load of a new fish. If you dump a bunch of fish in there all at once they probably won’t make it as the natural filtering of the bacteria will not be able to handle all the waste from the fish and their food.