Garden: Landscaping (part 2): pond

For the first time since we bought the place, there wasn't any sign that a house had once stood in the back garden...

Before: mountains of crushed rubble, with more hardcore underneath...

 

After:

With the rubble finally cleared and the site levelled around the house, the next job for the landscapers was the pond.

 

Months before the landscapers arrived on site, we'd agreed on a garden plan and budget. 

We discussed our ideas with the landscapers and they based much of the design on the rough sketches that Vicky provided from her notebook.

 

The design went through several iterations... there was much more that we wanted to do, but were compromised by both the size and shape of the plot and were also heavily limited by our budget. (Garden landscaping is not cheap!)

 

 

The pond design also proved something of a compromise. We originally had two large ponds; a fish pond and a wildlife pond and had originally toyed with connecting 'streams', bridges and piers... though in the end, the budget forced us to scale back on our lofty ambitions.    

We still managed to keep the two ponds, but now they would be joined together at slightly different levels, with a small waterfall in-between.

The basic outline for the pond was spray painted on the ground... 

 

...and the digger was used to start the excavations. A laser level was employed to get the heights exactly right.

 

It's deeper than it looks in the photos. Viewed from above, the smaller, left-hand pond will be for wildlife, like newts, frogs, etc and the goldfish will be living in the larger pond on the right.

 

Once all the levels were correct, the landscapers sifted through the soil removing all the sharp stones they could find, then added a layer of sand over the whole thing to further protect the pond liner from getting ripped.

Once the whole thing had been covered in sand, the pond liner was then laid over the top.

To push the liner down into place, the pond was filled with some water.

Unfortunately, within a few hours, the water had started going brown...

... and a closer look revealed the tell-tale oily marks on the surface which showed the filtering for our private water supply was failing. Our water was full of iron (brown) and manganese (oily).   

It was fixable, but we could do without having to pay for expensive water filtration repairs while already paying for the landscaping.

We had saved piles of slate from the foundations and fireplace of the old house and the landscapers used a lot of these to construct the new pond. This would help save us money and once again seemed rather fitting that parts of the old house would be recycled for the new one.

 

 

Building the waterfall between the two ponds. The pond pump and pipework was all hidden behind the slate as it was constructed.

Once all the slates had been positioned in the two ponds, the gaps were filled with 20mm golden gravel. At the last minute, we also took the opportunity to fit some underwater pond lights so that all the wiring could be concealed neatly in ducting under the slate.

In the garden plan, the large pond filter was supposed to have been sited in the corner of the garden where it couldn't be seen, but for some reason the landscapers decided to move it closer to the pond. We weren't sure if this was for functional reasons or down to 'lazyitis', but it was a bit of a bone of contention as it just looked ugly sticking out of the ground. The landscapers claimed that they would disguise it, but we weren't convinced.

The overlapping edge of the liner was cut back, buried slightly in the ground then concealed using large slates positioned around the perimeter of the pond.

We asked for two gently-sloping 'beaches' to be created - one at the end of each pond - in order to allow small animals and birds to be able to drink or wash safely.

Before the fish could move in to their new home, the pond would need to be 'conditioned'. It needed time to develop beneficial bacteria that will help keep the water free of dangerous compounds like ammonia, so we filled it with water, switched on the pumps and just left it gently trickling for the next few weeks.

Despite the fact that we hadn't done any planting around the pond yet, it was fantastic to see the local birds using it within a few days. One of our first visitors was this pied wagtail who enjoyed regular baths in the wildlife pond.

 

The natural slope of the land meant that we didn't site the pond where the landscapers had originally planned. We were really pleased about that, because the new position brought it into a more central position in the garden and closer to the house, so that we will be able to look right down into the fish pond from the balcony in the main bedroom. 

Still more building site than garden... the fish wouldn't be moving in for several weeks and there was a lot more work to do around the pond first.

Garden: Landscaping (part 1): clearing and levelling

 After demolishing the house by hand and then having to crush it all (due to being let down repeatedly by tradesmen), we'd really had enough of doing everything ourselves. We'd saved a lot of money, but it was all taking too long and our motivation was beginning to seriously flag. 

Back before we started the demolition, we'd had meetings with a local landscaper, who had agreed to take on our garden, but unfortunately was booked up for 18 months in advance. So while waiting for the landscaper, we continued to slowly clear the site - including taking up some of the concrete paths that had surrounded the old house.

  

The big electric breaker had proved to be a very useful purchase.

Taking up the concrete around the house didn't take too long, but we were building up large piles of rubble again which would cost money to have removed. It's a shame we weren't able to do this when we had the crusher on site, but we could only afford to hire it for a week and there just wasn't enough time.

 

To prepare for the landscaping work, we spent a lot of time just clearing all the rubbish from the site; burning wood, making lots of trips to the dump and selling off anything we could. We managed to get a good price for the old roof slates on Ebay, so it had been well worth taking the time to remove them carefully. 

In January, the landscapers finally arrived and they set to work on clearing and levelling the site. The intervening 10 months had seen grass and weeds growing through the piles of crushed hardcore and the whole area looked a bit of a mess. [click pics to enlarge]

Back when we originally built the house, we had to dig the foundations deeper than planned, so rather than buy in hardcore, the plan was to use the crushed stone piled up in the back garden to raise the ground levels in the front and around the side of the house. Recycle the old house to finish the new one...

 

The landscapers initial task was to clear the mountains of hardcore from the back garden. We had planned to do this work ourselves, but the landscapers suggested they do it instead, as they didn't want us piling up hardcore where flower beds might go. 

Once the mini-digger got going, the piles of crushed hardcore soon started disappearing...

 

Some hardcore was used to raised levels on the east side of the house...

...while the bulk of the crushed hardcore was utilised at the front of the house. 

We needed to shape the driveway and raise the ground levels so that it was possible to provide wheelchair access to the front door (in order to satisfy building regulations). 

The landscapers marked out the proposed ground levels with paint on metal rods.

 

The crushed stone was brought round to the front using the mini-dumper and spread out to match the levels that had been marked on the metal rods.

Large blocks of slate and granite that had been part of the old house were recycled for use as a retaining wall/border for some of the flower beds.

Any good topsoil was kept aside and added to the flower beds as we went along.

After a couple of days, the piles of hardcore had been whittled down and for the first time since we bought the plot almost a decade ago, we could finally see a clear space emerging in the garden. 

Unfortunately, that was not the end of it. Although the area had been cleared of crushed hardcore, the ground that been underneath the old house was unusable as a garden; the soil was dead with no nutrients left and was also peppered with yet more slate, stone and rubble. It was all going to have to be removed [sigh].

 

We unearthed several old pipes, cables and even a rusty old bike. And even worse, we were creating another huge pile of rubble that would need to be dealt with. It felt like we'd gone right back to square one...

The rubble would need to be taken away, so we stacked it all against the bank between the trees, so that a grab lorry could hopefully reach it from the farm track. 

The more rubble we gathered, the more it was going to cost and it was disheartening to see the pile growing and growing...

Any decent pieces of slate or spar stone that we unearthed were set aside for use around the pond or other landscaping.

They looked a lot better after getting cleaned up with a pressure washer. Once again it was nice to recycle bits of the old house - most of this slate came from the old chimney or had been used as foundation stones under the house.

Everywhere we looked, we seemed to be uncovering more concrete and stone. Collapsed coal sheds, plinths for the old oil tank and large slabs of concrete buried everywhere. 

We extricated this large chunk of concrete from the grass bank by hand... Years ago, the garden used to have a large model railway running around its perimeter and these pieces of concrete were the supports for the track, its bridges, stations, etc.

 

The landscapers were frustrated by the amount of rubble they were unearthing and the extra time it was taking to remove it all, so we offered to clear and level the rest of it over the weekend.

It was fun to get behind the "wheel" of a digger again... especially one with a heater.

After two solid days in the digger, we managed to get the area cleared and reasonably level.

The landscapers were delighted with the progress we had made over the weekend and they also managed to find a good deal on a grab lorry. It was just as well they had, as we ended up needing 5 loads taken away - that's around 70 tonnes of rubble! 

The grab lorry in action:

With the rubble pile removed, we could finally begin to get an idea of the size of the garden and how the house sat within it.  

It was as if the old house had never been there and we were really pleased with the (south-facing) space we had gained. 

It had always been our plan to do this, but sometimes achieving it seemed a long way off... now finally we had a 'blank canvas' on which we could create a new garden. [click pic to enlarge].