The Pond - part I

For months now, I've been working on turning my pool into a pond. A 15,000+ gallon pond - swimming pond, possibly. It's been a project, lemme tell you, phew!

My pond...uh, pool. I'm just letting it fulfill its dream to become a pond. 

I'm going to be posting a record of how we've been doing, with updates for how it's going in the future.  Most of the mortar/cement work has been done by my friend, the handy-man extraordinaire, who was willing to be hired and work with me using what materials I could use (I've got a number of allergies and chemical sensitivities that make it really important to choose materials carefully, if I want to grow edible aquatic plants or possibly make this a swimming pond some day).

So, first off, draining the pool.

May 8, 2014

May 16, 2014

This took about a week and a half using a teeny, tiny pump intended for a garden fountain, then pumped out through an attached hose and giving my yard plants a pleasant surprise soaking. The last bit was done using buckets, or using a shop-vac and pumping the water into buckets, which were hauled up and dumped out.

I kind of screwed up my knee hauling the water out and my poor handy-man friend ended up helping more with the last of the water more than expected!

The pool had devolved into a near pond, as you can see, with water bugs and dragonflies even. It was actually a bit upsetting to eliminate the entire little ecosystem, but as I was no longer going to be using the filter system, I had to get to all the drains and seal them off.

However, I bought a couple wading pools and saved some of the water, bacteria, and insect life, to re-introduce into The Pond later.  We turned out to have a lot of different water bugs; I counted twelve different types, at least, including baby dragonflies (dragonfly nymphs). Very neat, actually.

The cheapo wading pools

When we finally got all the water out, I let it dry for a few days, VERY happily went to the unexpected but awesome annual pond plant sale that fortuitously happened at just the right time, and then my buddy came over and we started construction.

Part II of The Pond, coming soon