If you start small, You can certainly do it yourself. I'm 67, and I made my little pond without help. It's only about a 100g pond (3'x 4'x 15"), but it's enough for several goldfish. Of course, I already have plans to improve and enlarge it this winter.

Here are pictures:

Here is a link that might be useful: My pond

Sharon, your small pond is lovely. How deep do you have to dig? I think I may have to have someone in with a scoop and get rid of roots. We had several trees cut down, but still have the trunks out there. I figure if I begin now, it will be ready for fish in the Spring.

Sharon, what a beautiful job you did. I love the pond. It looks so relaxing
Anne

We dug ours using 2 shovels and it took us six days. If you plan well, and don't push yourself too hard, it can be done. Just listen to the body because it will talk to you. :)

You might want to start with a preformed pond and falls � easy installation. Dig your hole three or four inches deeper than needed and then backfill and level the bottom with sand. Set the preformed in and backfill it with sand. A good axe will take care of the roots unless they are really major. My second pond effort was done this way, used an evaporative A/C pump, no filter. I used the dirt that came out of the hole to build up so my preformed "stream" had a little falls at the end of it. It gave me a lot of pleasure for a year of so.

I am 71 and doing a major renovation on my current pond.

{{gwi:229911}}

Slow going, but it will be worth the effort when it is finished.

If there are two people digging it goes faster, that's for sure. A backhoe is the easiest for bigger ponds. For me the hardest part was all the decisions!!!! I have a preformed pond, simply because it was free, otherwise I would have gone with a liner because you can shape them however you want.

Two suggestions that I think are important are:
1. If you have a preformed pond, be sure to get it level before you fill it. As Paul said, a layer of sand is important for leveling and to keep sharp rocks or roots from poking through.
2. If you have a liner pond and want a more natural look, plan for a lip where you can place the rocks that will be part in and part out of the water.

Good luck and keep us posted.
Anne

I love seeing every pond. They are lovely. Thanks for sharing. I may need a backhoe because of all the roots. I think I will need some stumps removed. I will let you know what the young man says who is coming to look at yard Monday.

I like your pond and admire your energy. I hope you will post pictures as you proceed with the re-do.

What is the wood-looking material that surrounds the area on the left and in the foreground? It looks like ordinary maybe 2x6 that you scored and bent. If so, can you give some tips on how it was done? Or is it a commercial product? Whatever, I might have need for something like that as may others.

Best of luck with your work. Do you have a timetable?

The easiest pond to build is above ground, or mostly above ground. It's also easier to watch and interact with your fish with an elevated pond. You can make a pond from a stock tank. These are used for watering farm animals so they are built to hold water without modifications. They come in a variety of sizes. You can easily face them with some kind of decorative blocks, which only have to be stacked, since the tank is self supporting. Add pump and filter and you're ready to go. Some people make a wood frame with 4x4s or something similar, Then line it with pond liner. Not as easy as the stock tank, but you can get creative with shapes it you wish. You can put a facade over the wood if you want a different look. Next easiest is a dug pond with a liner with a simple form -- like a rectangle. If you want vertical sides, and you have sandy soil like I do, you will have to line the sides with cement blocks. I didn't do that, and had my liner in place when we had a heavy rain. The whole thing collapsed into a mudhole.

Some people say a preformed pond is easier, but I simply failed trying to install and re-install one. The problem is that the top has to be level. The same is true of a pond with a flexible liner, but you can level it after it is built if necessary. If your preformed liner isn't level after you get it placed and filled, you have to take out the water, remove it and reset it. Mine would be perfect when I filled it, and a couple of weeks later would have a low side. After repeated efforts, I decided I didn't like the silly shape anyway and junked the thing. This may have been a soil type issue.

More important than how easy it is to build the pond, is how easy it is to maintain. That's another long post.

You really should spend the winter planning and re-planning your pond. Once you know exactly what you are going to do and have your materials, you can build the thing in a week -- unless you are making a big pond and digging the whole thing by hand.

Some questions you need to consider:

What kind of fish do you want to have and how many?
Are you going to overwinter the fish in the pond or bring them in?
What is the most convenient place to enjoy your fish? This is often a patio or deck with a view from a window.
Are there children that may be attracted to the pond (with or without your approval)? What provisions will you make for their safety?
Will your pond site allow you access to all sides of the pond for maintenance? Think about vacuuming the pond bottom or cleaning out a filter.

When I built my pond, I redid everything about 3 times. Now that I see how it all works, I think I can do the whole rebuild in one try.

mgeca asked, "What is the wood-looking material that surrounds the area on the left and in the foreground?"

It is treated 2x4, got it for half price at my local lumber yard because it was already rather warped. Where needed to accommodate the curvature I scored one side a little more that half of the thickness of the 2x. I drilled through it top to bottom as needed and it is held in place with 3/8" rebar dowels 1' long. In places I have placed brick under it to keep it from settling. I leveled it as I put it in. I will run my liner up and over this leaving plenty of slack for settling. The plan is to place rock against and over this using Super Stuff foam for stability. This idea comes from somewhere on the Skippy Filter site

Hey Sharon nice pond! What kind of filteration setup do you have?

Right now, all I have is one of those little in-pond box filters from Lowes, with a couple layers of spongy filters on top and some "bioballs" under it with the pump. It's working well enough with my current fish load, since the water parameters are all consistently perfect. My little fishies keep growing though, so I will be making a good exterior biofilter this winter. I'm looking for an attractive container with about a 10 gallon capacity so I don't have to hide it.

Lovely ponds guys. You are starting with the right idea--research! My first pond was a kit--liner and pump. Pump was too small for the waterfall and circulation. So I built it bigger the following year with a waterfall box and a bigger submersible pump. The pump kept clogging up and still didn't have enough flow. So I built it bigger with a real bottom drain into 55 gal drum sc and external pumps. Not a great idea in my climate as even though I blew out the line to the bd the pipe still froze and cracked under the pond and because the waterfall was a separate liner I always had leaking there. The settling chambers weren't big enough to do much settling and I really had to watch draw down issues. So I built it bigger with an retrofit bottom drain (over the liner so is pulled during the winter) a 300 gal settling chamber and a continuous liner all the way from the waterfall and pond. After 4 tries I finally got it right.

If I build a pond again there's some things I would do differently. I would have a ledge all around the pond that is just deep and wide enough for rocks to hide the edge of the pond with a few plant shelves in front of that and maybe some plant pockets in some areas. I also would not "bowl" the bottom of the pond. This is recommended for ponds with through the liner bottom drains. Mine sits on top so I don't get as much debri going into my settling chamber. The bowl bottom makes it really hard to sit plants on the bottom--I have to use rocks under the edge to level the water lily pots. I like the idea of bog filtration but in my short climate might not work--sure looks great on ponds I've seen with it.

So the short of this story is build it as big as you can the first time, pay attention to construction details, what pumps you want to use and filtration. If you have goldfish the filtration needs aren't as high. I have both koi and goldfish--the koi eat alot and root in my plants. Oh and I dug my pond by hand with 5 gal buckets to take out the dirt. I know we hauled 1500 lbs of dirt to the landfill site so that's alot of buckets. My sons helped me with transferring the dirt but I did all the digging as I'm a perfectionist.

I am very excited. I met with fellow on Monday, and next week he will be putting an 8x11x3' w/7' waterfall/stream. The only downside is it is the time of year when I won't get to enjoy it with fish. I will look forward to the Spring. I have so much to learn. I will be looking on the forum often for information. It will be to late to put a fish in?? I feel like a child getting a Christmas present and can't play with it till next year.

jalal: I have lived that story except for the freezing - no problem where I am. In the current rebuild I'm putting in the shallow ledge for rocks, the plant ledges and doing away with the bowl shape bottom. These are the primary reasons for the rebuild. The BD will be gravity flow all inside the pond. At 71, I'm just not risking a rework becasue of leaks in the liner.

Ponderpaul--I can see you've done a lot of work already. How did you design your bog filter area--at least that's what it looks like to me on the far edge. I've been thinking of a modified bog on the side of the pond where the iris are or some kind of aeration tubing along there at least as the algae seems to accumlulate in areas that are heavily planted.

jalal: This is a picture of the bog before I put the liner down. At the most it will not be more than 4" - 6" deep. I use water hyacinths as my filtering plants - they go wild in my zone, 7a in the summer. They are totally floating and require no nutrients accept what they take out of the water. When these nutrients get low in the water they turn yellow so I have to remove them into a very weak manure tea for a few days. They come right back. I will have to use a barrier to keep them from floating into the pond as you see in the previous picture. Also, they will become a lot thicker and thus a better filter.

You would probably need to find a plant more native to your cooler climate that might do the same thing.

{{gwi:229913}}

I would think you could still acclimate fish in your new pond, I heard fall is better than spring to add fish but that is what I have heard and done with no problems..I am excited to see your new pond when its done..you will love it!

I feel that putting in my pond was the greatest thing that I ever did, yes it was hard work but its the most relaxing place to spend time and releave stress.

Here is a link that might be useful: Tips and Supplies for a Great Pond