Water Rights: Create a Water Garden in Your Backyard
Always wanted a water view? Create your own destiny—simply and naturally— by building a water garden. Both you and the wildlife you attract will be glad you did.
July/August 2003
By Kellie Sisson Snider
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A water garden is a venue for you to relax, for plants to thrive, and for animals to gather. It can be designed as large, as small, and as creative as you have space and energy for. Visit aquascapedesigns.com for inspiration, products, and more water gardening literature.
Photo Courtesy Aquascape
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Water gardening is the art of luring nature’s beauty to your home. Lately the hobby has become mechanized, commercialized, and complicated, but it doesn’t have to be that way. People kept water gardens hundreds, even thousands, of years ago without expensive, labor-intensive equipment. It was done naturally and simply. It still can be. Today’s water gardens can be even simpler to keep than in days gone by if you are selective about what modern devices to use.
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Why bother?
Water gardens attract natural pest predators. Frogs, toads, and garden snakes are likely to show up uninvited, but welcome them! They eat insects, grubs, and slugs—all those things your neighbors spray pesticides to get rid of. And if you worry about the pond attracting mosquitoes, relax. The fish in the water gobble up mosquito larva, while the toads and snakes make meals of the adults.
Also consider the auditory advantages of a water pool in your yard. The use of a solar or low-amp pump to power a waterfall or fountain creates white noise that softens the rumble of cars and other neighborhood sounds. This white noise isn’t just buzz—it’s the trickle of moving water, humankind’s favorite music.
Making the pond
Relax. Pull a lawn chair into the yard, look around, and decide where you’d most enjoy your water garden.
• The pond’s location should be visible from your favorite outdoor sitting spot as well as from indoors if possible.
• If you live in the North, position the pond in direct sunlight to make your growing season as long as possible. In the South, give it partial shade to keep the water cool enough for plants and fish and to discourage algae.
Contemplate. Decide how large you want it. Your space is the final arbiter. A pond can be any size from a large pot on your patio to an acre in your lower forty.
Choose a liner. The most commonly used liner, a sheet of rubber called EPDM, can be purchased in most home improvement or garden supply stores. Its disadvantages are weight, cost, and size restrictions. Permalon, a polyethelene membrane, is cheaper, lighter, and can be made to any size you order—without a seam—but you have to special order it.
Measure your liner. The liner’s width should equal the width of the pond opening plus the depth of the pond multiplied by two. Then you should add at least one foot of overhang times two. So, if your pond is five feet wide and two feet deep, your liner will need to be at least eleven feet wide. Use the same equation, plugging in the pond’s length, to figure the liner’s length.
Decide on the depth. If you keep goldfish, your pond needs to be only two feet deep in most parts of the United States, although deeper is better in colder climates. You want your pond to be deep enough that it doesn’t freeze solid in winter and that the lower reaches remain cool in summer.
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