Converting an in-ground pool to a garden pond

[Timothy]

This will take a ton of words to explain, and I'll share the good, and the bad of what I did, how I did it, the mistakes, and with the help of people smarter than I am, the fixes. Sort of an autobiography of "Frog's Neck Inn".
We had a 16' X 32' in-ground pool that was 8' deep on one end, and 4' deep on the other. We maintained the pool for years as a pool, adding chemicals to keep it clear, sweeping the bottom, back-washing the filter (and losing water by the very nature of back-washing which bothered me because we're on a well.) We used the pool very seldom, and yours truly being a total wimp wouldn't go in it unless it was at least 78 degrees. This posed a problem. We live in Maine, and the water temp might hit 78 degrees for three days the last of July. Whether we used it or not we still added chemicals did the work and spent probably $450 a year to keep it up.
One day four years ago for what ever reason I told my wife I was going to fill it in and make it a pond. I said we'd plant stuff, I'd build a pergola for shade, and we'd really use it a lot more. She thought I was bluffing and said sure.
Shazaam!
A couple of days later while she was at work a truck dumped 15 yards of river run sand onto the side yard. The truck couldn't get to the back so I had to shovel sand into a small yard wagon, haul it to the pool with the rider mower and dump it in the pool. It took 80 shovels full to give the wagon everything it wanted to haul in one load.
For years I was trying to keep the pool spotless, now I'm about to deliberately muddy it up. Am I sure? Really? Commit!
It was traumatic to watch the first load of sand poor in. I was committed.
Pull the ladders, pull the diving board, strip anything that said "swimming pool". I decided to keep the original skimmer circuit but abandon the bottom drain because if anything went wrong with it I wasn't going to drain all of the water and dig through five feet of sand to repair it. Over the course of a month and two more loads of sand we had the beginnings a pond.
We did some planting, I transplanted some cattails, and by the end of the summer we had what you see below. We were using the skimmer from the swimming pool, and the swimming pool filter. the bottom was sand, the fish were thriving, the cattails were doing great. I bought some fence posts, made some brackets, put the posts in the pond upside down, (because of the rail holes) and had "pilings" for the "dock". We used landscaping fabric over the top edges to hide the pool design. The pergola took a few days to construct, and we used a jib sail as our "roof" and sun shade. I knew a pond not too far away where there were some abandoned gold fish so I took my cast net and caught a few (total of 17 altogether) and carried them in a bucket to their new home.
We bought some patio furniture for our new oasis and by the end of the summer were pretty pleased with ourselves. That fall we drained all the lines, put in the plugs, and put everything away in anticipation of winter. In the past we had just let the pool freeze, so we worried a little about the fish, but the pond they came out of was shallower then this, so we were sure they'd be OK.




The next spring things began well, the plants came back very healthy, and all of the fish were accounted for.......plus a few. The water was cloudy, so you couldn't see the bottom clearly, but almost.

I'll be back.......

 

[Meyer Jordan]

Looks great!

 

[RobAmy]

Great job

 

[addy1]

What a good use for a pool! Love your pool pond. Great job

 

[CountryEscape]

Great job! I see you put in a liner, on top of the sand. Good idea, too. Can't wait to see more pics from this year. How fantastic to have such a large pond!

 

[Timothy]

Thank you all for the kind comments!
The spring continued into summer and the water never did clear up the way I had hoped. It wasn't muddy, but not pretty either. We kept planting and expanding the garden aspect and by fall had quite a collection of wild life. Fish, frogs, salamanders, helgramites, water boatmen, just about anything you'd see in a natural pond.
The biggest problem was the summer was a dry one and the water level was going down by evaporation plus my back-washing the filter didn't help. I put rain gutters on two sides of the shop roof, (a converted two car garage with a 10' carport) with downspouts and modified fittings to accommodate light 1 1/4" hose to carry rain water to the pond 25 feet away. The surface of the roof area was twice the pond surface area so we'd get a pretty good ratio to the pond.
Towards the end of the summer we'd see the occasional bubble come to the surface. I did some inquiring and studying and to make an even longer story short, I had created a toxic bomb that wasn't going to heal itself. Several problems had materialized. 1. The pool pump not only being inefficient wasn't doing anything for the deeper areas, only the surface. 2. The pool filter was designed for already clean water. 3. The most serious was all the fish poop, dead plant material, dead critters, leaves, and anything else decomposing on the bottom had no where to go. It just permeated the sand because the original pool liner was still intact and didn't allow any of the rot to sift through.
A cloud descended on our oasis. It was too late in the year to do anything drastic, so we closed it up for the season and thought about the alternatives.
I didn't want to give up the pond, so there was no alternative. It had to be rebuilt. In the spring we pumped all the water out, (there's an incline beside the pond, and all we had to do was fill the hose and the water would syphon out.) We saved all the critters we could catch. The fish went into three big Lowe's storage boxes, the other wildlife went into buckets and back to the local natural pond.
I bought two 8' lengths of 3/4" pipe, a coupling, a cap, and a 10" spike. Put it all together, made a spear, and poked holes in the pool liner. The deep end I had to use a maul to drive the spear through the sand, but we put some holes in! A lot of holes! All of the remaining water drained out, and the sand was dry in two days.
.

This time we put in a liner, a Fishmate filter, and brought in some water from a pool filling company.



The hoses on the filter were temporary until I could get some 1 1/2" PVC.

(If you're not bored yet, the best is yet to come!)

 

[CountryEscape]

Nope, not bored at all! Neat you thought of draining the water through the old pool liner, to keep that sandy area under your pond liner dryer in the future! I'm anxious to see how this all evolved this spring. Bet it's an exciting story.

 

[sissy]

Don't know what the pool looked like and who the heck cares because these looks a thousand percent better and what a nice place to relax and i am sure you have not looked back and said sorry I did this and bet your wife is happy also and all your visitors are green with envy that you had the guts to do this

 

[Rach B]

U sure know how to make work for urself lol! Cant wait to see how it turns out

 

[Timothy]

Thank you all!
Last spring was the first of the "new" pond. The plants are beginning to mature, and things are coming together. We added a few more plants and I was thinking of putting in a bog but was having a hard time deciding where to put it. Being the world's foremost procrastinator it became one of those things I had to think about. I had mentioned it to Addy1 and she graciously sent up a "care package" of bog plants. While we were going through the re-construction they lived in another big plastic storage box, but outside. They were flourishing so I wasn't concerned for them other than where would I put them. After the pond was a pond again, I still didn't know what to do with the bog plants, so I built a couple of islands and floated the plants in boxes of pea gravel that hung below the island level.



This eased my mind and gave me time to think (Procrastinate?) I had a place picked out that I thought would work for the bog, but couldn't figure out the best way for the water to return to the pond without raising the whole bed of the area above pond level.

An awful lot of fill to manage by hand. The rest of the pond was doing well, and there was no immediate need (a very thin line sometimes between "need" and "want"!)
So, I contented myself for the summer with the way things were going along. The only thing that bothered me in the back of my mind was the water clarity. It wasn't dirty, or green, or smell, but just hazy enough that the bottom wasn't always apparent. The fish could be seen on the bottom, but only because of their coloring. The Fishmate was working well, but I still wanted a bog for the water, and for the added interest it would provide. Reading some of Addy1's posts and her enthusiasm for her bogs made me think there must be something to it.
Here's a few photos of the pond last summer.

View attachment 80388

 

[addy1]

Love the look of your pond, how restful

 

[CountryEscape]

Wow, not sure how you got pea gravel in pots to float, but it looks wonderful, and very natural. Do you have fake rock covering the edges maybe? I also have a fairly large bog, nothing as large as Addy's, on my goldfish pond, and that water stays crystal clear year round. I struggle with the koi pond keeping it close to as clear. I'm also a firm believer in the filtration benefits of a bog. If it's meant to be, you will find a way. In the meantime, WOW, I am very envious of the space you have created!

 

[Timothy]

Thank you Country! All of the rocks are real picked up from around the property. The worst one was the main one in the waterfall. Laid it in and the water didn't flow aesthetically across it, so had to turn it over. Ugh!
The islands are closed cell 2" rigid foam household foundation insulation available at Lowe's or Home Depot. I prefer the blue. Just cut out a random shape, cut holes just large enough to support the lip of the pot, I use EPDM on the top, with holes cut in it to accommodate the pots, and burlap on top of that. The EPDM isn't necessary, but it helps the burlap hide the foam board. As you can see in the first photo of my last post, the kidney shaped island has two plastic pots through the holes, and a ceramic pot on the surface also with pea gravel in it. The floatation capabilities of this material are amazing.
There is a bog now. That edition of this long winded saga will come out tomorrow. Sorry to drag this on so long...............

 

[addy1]

We are holding our breaths for the end of the saga!

I made some nice islands for pots to float around, ..............................the heron used it as a fishing deck.................island gone.

 

[Timothy]

We are holding our breaths for the end of the saga!

I made some nice islands for pots to float around, ..............................the heron used it as a fishing deck.................island gone.

I didn't think about the heron! We had one visit last year, but he didn't stay for lunch. If the dog had only been just a little quicker............ I'm not sure ours are smart enough to use an island they're so used to walking in salt mud.