A stone and liner pond I am building

[MountainGuardian]

I will be the first to admit that I know almost nothing about building ponds...

That said an elderly lady that all of my sons have worked for over the years and myself when she needed bigger things done, pressured me for three years to build her this grand pond. I was adamant about not getting involved for years but she just couldn't get a crew to actually do anything but take her money so I eventually caved and agreed to do it. I now know why the crews stopped showing up...... She is about half senile and changes what she wants on an hourly basis... I have been working on this for years now and we still don't have it done as she keeps changing her mind on everything and so we keep having to redo everything over and over and over again to keep her happy. LOL...

This has been an interesting project to say the least.... I figured that it would be a good way for me to learn before trying to build my own stone and liner pond here on my farm, I can't say that I have learned the "right" way to do it, but I have sure discovered a mess of ways "not" to do it....

Gathering stone and hauling it in my truck... "Not the way to do it"....





We must have loaded and hauled at least 18 tons of stone from various places before I finally found a guy that would deliver the same stone 14 tons at a time for a pretty reasonable price. Three dump truck loads of that and I started making some headway...






One thing that I did like the way it worked out was the spiraling path in the stone work. This allowed me to get the wheelbarrow loads of stone in there fairly easily, well okay... it was still a bear but at least it was possible to do without killing myself... No way I was carrying all those 160 to 220 pound rocks across that to where they needed to go by hand...

I lost all my pictures of the waterfalls and streams when I lunched my last hard drive, but I will get some more pictures of all that this spring...

[two_wheeled]

Wow. Sounds ambitious.
Can you draw up some plans for everyone to review and offer suggestions? You'll get some constructive feedback and maybe some criticism but it will help you make one heck of a pond in the end. You're in the right place for good advice. This forum is great.

[icu2]

Besides a mud type pond that is so large it can't realistically be filtered, I'd put bottom drains
or have some type of design that would remove the debris off the bottom of the pond. There's
some great threads that are "sticky" at the top of the Construction forum... Here's one that, although
many of the pictures are gone due to a forum crash years ago, enough remain that it shows what
a pond builder finds when rebuilding rocked ponds:

https://www.koiphen.com/forums/showt...Rocks-In-Ponds!

Check out some of the others for some good info.

[MountainGuardian]

The pond has a 45 foot stream and two water falls at this point. It also has an average 3 foot wide 1 foot deep loose gravel bed that runs about 40% of the perimeter now with plants through out it. The water flow rate is right about 10,000 gallons an hour. There is also an 8 foot diameter and 4 foot deep sediment pool about halfway through the stream to help settle out any sediment before it is returned to the main pond and this pool is plumbed to divert a portion of the return water through the gravel/plant bog perimeter area.

The pond is going to build some amount of detritus no matter what with all the pine trees so close but she won't even allow me trim to a tree branch much less remove a tree anywhere, she is very sensitive about "harming" trees in such a way, almost as sensitive as she is about harming bugs..... I made the mistake of tossing a bug to her Koi fish and she chewed me out for an hour about such a cruel man....lol...

I agree that the pond cannot be effectively filtered, but she is not concerned about as she does not ever want her fish in it, it is just to look at and listen to. She is also thrilled as it has brought in some more wild life into her yard. In the end it is all about what ever makes her happy, she is the boss...