ok so its been a few weeks since my last update and i have been taking pics of the process so i will share them with you guys now.
Week 2: Just some general tiding up
This was the "grow bed". Its just a preform poly pond that they stuck some hoses into and added a bit of gravel at the bottom. Was a super good filter tho! As it trapped tons of fish poop and algae and smelt awful! It was a nightmare to pull apart!
this is the "grow bed" after everything was ripped out and filled with pea gravel and some of the old plants replanted
Week 3: My plan of attack was to destroy the "waterfall" as it was fairly shoddy and looked pretty lame for a pond that size!
After destroying the waterfall (which was half made with pavers cemented together!) i started to re-shape the pond a little bit. I wanted some ledges for plants and a sharper drop under the waterfall as the water was flowing onto the pond liner, As i was digging i found water between the 3 layers of liners! DISASTER! I thought maybe it was just water getting trapped from condensation or overflow? so i decided to pump it out with a trusty power head. after about 20min it stopped pumping and i left it for awhile and turned the pump back on and there was heaps more water! So that's when i knew it was time to completely pull the pond apart!
So a full 2 days of moving rocks, slaps and dirt the liner was free but as you can see the pond wasn't quite empty and it was also getting dark!
Week 4: So after feeling pretty beaten realizing that this is going to be a fair bit bigger then just redoing the water fall and adding some ledges to the pond. I took a look on the bright side and thought hey this gives me the opportunity to pretty much start from scratch and make this exactly how i want!
So that weekend i got up put my wet-suit boots on and jumped in the super cold water to empty out all the sludge, sticks, rocks, gravel and sand that had built up over who knows how many years!? After it was finally empty i could pull the liner out and start digging! but not without its set backs of course! That pond liner was heavy! to my surprise there was a layer of old carpet (as a puncture barrier i guess) which had gone rotten and smelt worse then a sewage treatment plant! So i ripped all that out and then there was the last 2 layers of builders plastic! And the cause of the water between the layers!
There is a big pine tree stump about 1m from the edge of the pond and to no ones surprise it had sent all of its roots into the pond and a few had poked their way through the plastic! After ripping out the last 2 layers of plastic i saw just how bad it was and how much more work changing the shape of the pond will be!
Hopefully i can attack those roots next weekend!
but I have to agree that's in need of a clean out
