When I was
about 14, I convinced my parents to let me run riot in their garden. I chopped
out all the exotic rubbish, replanted with indigenous and even put in a small
pond (made with a piece of orange roofing plastic that my old man found for me
somewhere…). Since then, I’ve always wanted a grander dam or lake in my
backyard, but never lived anywhere long enough to make it happen.
Fast
forward around 25 years and I found myself buying a property with Meg. I looked
at the backyard and saw my chance. Fairly flat ground with only a vegetable
garden and a lot of lawn to conquer. In the days before COVID, I
imagined hiring a backhoe and digging one ginormous pond to house Large-mouthed Bass in order
that I could go fishing in my own backyard… So, we moved the veg patch and enclosed
it, got rid of a rudimentary rockery and built a fine BBQ area in its place.
All I had to do was get working on the lake.
By the time
I finished sorting our all the other upgrades and renovations around the house,
COVID had arrived and lockdown was in full swing. Not only was the backhoe idea
out, so was the ginormous pond for fishing - an alternate outcome was required,
one that was going to cost very little and surely involve a rather large amount
of personal labour… Back to the old days it was then, self-dug holes and plastic
liners would be the order of the day. Since long and wide liners cost a small
fortune, I planned to use smaller sheets of plastic that are more routinely
used in roofing to provide under tile waterproofing. At 250um thick, they should
do the trick. My intentions had changed somewhat too, out with the big fishing
pond and in with a number of shallower marshes for amphibians, crakes and
flufftails.
One
afternoon with 'lockdown beverages' in hand, Meg and I arranged a pile of soda bottles,
plant pots and hockey sticks around the backyard to form a basis for the grand
scheme. A few days later, we started laying the main water feeder pipe – a 50mm
ldpe pipe connected to our JoJo overflow. Trenching and pipe laying done, a
multitude of connections were fixed and laid, ready to fill all the ponds and
marshes.
Phase one
would be a small pond – something that would allow us to test form and
function. Early on a Saturday morning, Kaily and I headed outside with spades,
shovels and wheelbarrows. The first hole was scheduled to be 3 metres long, 1.7metres
wide and around 40 centimetres deep. 5 hours and 36 wheelbarrow loads of dirt later,
we had our first hole. To provide some protection, we tipped in a few piles of
old cut grass and laid the plastic. In went some water from the JoJo to get
things going, before the evenings predicted rain arrived and proved that our piping worked
too. Now we needed some life, so we hit a nearby marsh for some reeds, before
another downpour the following day filled the pond. In the space of a week, we
had increased our water capacity by 2000 litres and breathed some new life into what was the sterile lawn.
*Postscript.
Marsh 1 would indeed be the practice run, for we could not keep the water
oxygenated enough. We ended up filling the pond in with soil from Pond 1 to
create a contiguous marsh. Successfully punctured the lining and had to re-dig
it and re-line it…
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| Planning - with soda bottles and hockey sticks |
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| Feeder pipe form the JoJo overflow |
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| Breaking ground |
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| Almost done |
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| Black liner with first water going in |
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| Almost complete |
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| There was a leak somewhere, but it was a case of digging it out again |
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| Re-lined and filled |
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