Last Summer, I got an itch to make a rock pond. I envisioned a pond full of lilypads, inhabited by frogs, surrounded by a rock garden.
With no plan and nothing but a vision in my head, I got to digging. Now, in the end, I want to say the price of the entire garden and pond was around $75, simply because of the pond rocks I had to keep buying to fill the area. But the pond itself was only $16.
You can decide for yourself what you might want around your pond, but I’m here to tell you exactly how I made my pond because it was surprisingly easy. With a few mistakes along the way.
To begin with, I plotted off the area I wanted to use. Simple enough with dowels or popsicle sticks and string to “draw” out the area. Then I just got to digging. I scrapped off the layer of grass where I wanted my pond and garden to be.
Then it was time to build the pond. I dug down a bit, but because my pond was under a tree, I had an issue with roots, so I also had to build up. It wasn’t too bad. I just took the dirt I dug from the inside of the pond and built it up along the outside. In the end, my pond was about 8 inches deep.
After that it was time to find a way to hold the water in. This is where I went wrong. I initially bought a $10 tarp. Afterall, tarps protect things from rain, they should hold water in as well. Spoiler alert, it didn’t. Which I didn’t find out until after I filled the area with rocks and filled the pond. So, I went with plan B and ordered an outdoor pond liner off amazon for $16. This is all you need to buy to make this pond unless you don’t have a supply of rocks around your yard. You might even be able to get by with a plastic drop cloth if you have one making it completely free! Now you can also get away a plastic kiddie pool. but unless you cover it with a tarp or liner anyway, it will be a bit more colorful of a pond.
Once the liner was in place, I made a ring around it with rocks I found around my yard, piling them around the sides. I lined the inside with pond stones but I don’t recommend bothering because they just rolled into the center. I edged the rest of the garden with more stone and then filled it with several bags of pond rocks. I also put some big rocks in the center for frogs and birds to perch on. Then, all that was left was to fill the pond! I also added some lilypads I plucked and tried to propagate, but that was a fail.
Now to see if it lasted the winter and if the frogs would move in.
Spring came and the pond looked great! Quite a few leaves had fallen in so I might need to do some cleaning of it at some point, but other than that, it looked great!
This morning, I peeked at my pond to see how things were going. And I found SIX frogs swimming around in there! I sat watching them for sometime. They did seem happy in their new home. So I think this experiment worked! I plan to get rid of the mosquitoes and put some plants in and around the pond next. But it’s not bad for a $16 frog pond.
~Tiffany
