CW's Back Yard Water Garden Begins!

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My dad is no good at taking pics, and my hands are usually too full of GIANT ROCKS to snap a selfie.

I could do like some youtubers and set up a camera all day to record myself.
that or enlist the wife; she's gotta be part of this epic saga, you know...
 
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Bog liner is in. Just in time for more rain tonight. All surfaces graded @ 1/4" per foot slope back to snorkel pit. Little tip I picked up—don't remember where: Don't put your snorkel up against the edge of your bog. If bog ever clogs, water will come up through snorkel. If snorkel is right at edge, can overflow the liner.

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I look at your soils and start to cry i spent days digging out hammering in rocks removing old roots and i even had to build a cinderblock wall to hold the side of the excavation.
But enough wine, its a good showing you made some great progress.
Not sure how your joining the two culverts together . they do have collars to join them , but you can also use epdm cut a hole 2 inches smaller then the pipe and stretch it over the pipe. leaving like 2 foot tails where you can wrap the sides around the vertical pipe.

They also sell end caps do you plan to utilize these in your design?
 
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bravo your making some great head way
 
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I look at your soils and start to cry

It's okay. It's worth the tears. I dug through our clay layer with a transfer shovel. Have only had to break out the maddock for a few swings here and there.

Not sure how your joining the two culverts together. they do have collars to join them
They also sell end caps do you plan to utilize these in your design?

Wasn't planning to do anything—3" pipe just empties into end of open centipede and centipede just slips into hole cut into snorkel. We had a group pow wow about this a gazillion pages back in this thread and I thought the consensus was "doesn't really matter."

I read some technical docs awhile back from Aquascape saying if you're using a 2" pipe to connect to centipede instead of the 3" it's designed for to just cut the stub off the end of the centipede and shove the pipe in.

Do you think it matters that the centipede end is capped and/or tightly fused to the snorkel? I could use liner + zip tie to seal end of centipede and spray foam to close gaps between centipede and snorkel.
 
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It is more of a sharp corner that i would be weary of against the liner. Fabric the area well.
 
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Spent the day gathering bog materials and strengthening milk crates with PVC. 6 yards of stone staged in the driveway. Having access to the dump trailer is awesome.

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Milk crate modification. Got this idea from @Pondfun some time ago.

THAT'S where my cold-pond fee is going???? PVC pipes??? Sheesh.

I doubt you're ever going to just sit back and enjoy the pond from a lounge chair for an entire summer, CW; you just NEED something to do, I think!

Looking good!
 
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What a mess. Today is Day 6 of trying to recover a bunch of river rock from the front yard. Was buried under grass that moved in over bark dust and bark chips. And all different sizes from about 1/2 inch to 6". Needed to be taken out of the front yard anyway, but has been kind of a disaster trying to make use of it in the bog filter.

Was able to manually sort out the bigger stuff to add to the bottom and about 1/2 of the middle-sized stuff for the middle layer. But the rest of it—about 1.5 yards—is still just too dirty with clay chunks and mixed up with plant material and bark chips to be of any use without extremely tedious manual labor. And that's AFTER sifting it with my homemade trommel. Think I'm going to abandon it and just move onto filling with pea gravel rather than mess with.

Will end up with 6" of large cobble at bottom, 6" of 1-2" round drain rock in the middle and about 12" of pea gravel on top. Hoping 12" of pea gravel doesn't make it impossible to properly backflush, but we'll see!
 
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Think I'm going to abandon it and just move onto filling with pea gravel rather than mess with.

Will end up with 6" of large cobble at bottom, 6" of 1-2" round drain rock in the middle and about 12" of pea gravel on top. Hoping 12" of pea gravel doesn't make it impossible to properly backflush, but we'll see!
takes a while, but eventually we all get there; I hosed/cleaned off 1-1/2 yds of pea gravel for bog v1. Took me 8 hours and my hands were literally like prunes and they hurt. Bog v2? 3 yds of pea gravel? Closed my eyes and dumped it all in. Felt great the next day!
 
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What a mess. Today is Day 6 of trying to recover a bunch of river rock from the front yard. Was buried under grass that moved in over bark dust and bark chips. And all different sizes from about 1/2 inch to 6". Needed to be taken out of the front yard anyway, but has been kind of a disaster trying to make use of it in the bog filter.

Was able to manually sort out the bigger stuff to add to the bottom and about 1/2 of the middle-sized stuff for the middle layer. But the rest of it—about 1.5 yards—is still just too dirty with clay chunks and mixed up with plant material and bark chips to be of any use without extremely tedious manual labor. And that's AFTER sifting it with my homemade trommel. Think I'm going to abandon it and just move onto filling with pea gravel rather than mess with.



Will end up with 6" of large cobble at bottom, 6" of 1-2" round drain rock in the middle and about 12" of pea gravel on top. Hoping 12" of pea gravel doesn't make it impossible to properly backflush, but we'll see!

A couple tricks to others down the road reading the blog is to place plywood down on the lawn or driveway before you dump the stone.
There is a new bag dumpster company around here . it's where you buy a heavy duty bag that has straps these are for you to place your construction debris or cleaned out basement junk into and then you call the company and they have a winch that picks up the bag. it's a small canvas dumpster basically. They then empty it into there truck you get to keep the bag for the next load. or as you dump the stone you can place the bags i mentioned on the ground and dump layers of the stone into them. An other trick we have used when having to move stone is to have the stone loaded into a similar bag . You drive to the yard they load a 1 yard bag with the stone in it. then you use the excavator to haul it to the pond and there is also usually a flap to control how fast the stone comes out. the bottom. sorry C.w i should have mentioned this sooner.


Don't worry about back flushing @addy1 never has and when i tried it was a waist of time.
 
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Our favorite rock yard now delivers gravel and small stone in those bags - it's the best thing EVER. No more rocks the grass FOREVER.
 

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