overflowing pond!

[Ryan12345]

Good afternoon,
I have recently moved into my girlfriends house, and the garden is constantly flooding when it rains and takes ages to dry out. We have recently found out that a long time ago there was a pond which was filled in with stones and mud, but the lining was left in!

If anyone can give any advice on this, it would be very welcome

cheers,

Ryan

 

[CountryEscape]

Sounds like it would be a real mess to clean out, but you would end up with a free liner, and pond! The only bad thing is that the liner more than likely leaks, that's why they left it in and filled it. To clean it if the liner was in good shape would be very tedious to make sure you didn't puncture the liner, but if you KNOW the liner is bad, then you can just dig out the muck ... not sure where you will deposit it ... and rocks (keep them for the new pond), buy a new liner and make your own creation. Good luck!!!

 

[Craig58]

Sounds like you're not looking to restore the pond but to figure out how to keep the area drained.

Hard to say via the Internet but here's a few ideas.

Get a post hole digger and dig 3-5 post holes down until you hit liner. Chop out the liner, fill the bottom 8-12" with stone than soil on top. (if a 3' ft hole). You want to make sure the liner is ruptured in enough places, near the lowest points, so that the water can drain down.

The next thing is to keep water out of the area to start with. Maybe regrade the area and make the pond area slightly higher and sloped towards where u want the water to go. Check downspouts and make sure they aren't draining into the pond area. Redirect them if necessary.

The last thing is to build some water basins to hold some of the water. Maybe add some water barrels at your down spouts to collect some storm water and let it drain out in a controlled fashion. The worst case is you bury a tank to collect water along with a sump pump to pump it out to a drain area.

You could also make the most of it and plant a bog garden in the area that will look nice and soak up a lot of water. That would probably be a favorite of many here if you don't want to rebuild the pond. And there are many others here that could give you advice of plants for a bog garden.

Craig

 

[Ryan12345]

Thanks very much for your advice guys Yes Craig, I am trying to improve the drainage and keep the area more dry, especially as we have a baby on the way in December, so this maybe a project for the summer!

thanks again for both of your advice, much appreciated

 

[addy1]

There are a lot of plants that love wet soil, easy fix, make it a neat bog garden. I love my carnivorous bog garden.

 

[JohnHuff]

What I would do is to dig a small hole down to the liner and then buy a small pond pump. You can get one of those at Harbor Freight for $10 and then drain the old pond through a hose to the drain under the downspouts.