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Hi All!
I'm hoping someone out there has experience with what just happened to me and/or can offer me some advice on how to fix my problem.
Last weekend, I dug the hole for a 165g preformed pond shell which will be the home for a couple of aquatic turtles. I have spent the last few weekdays leveling the bottom with a 2" layer of sand (not an easy feat!) and backfilling the sides with dirt. I was 3/4ths of the way finished with the backfilling, and it rained cats and dogs last night. Now, my pond form is almost full of water, and is floating in a mudhole! I'm so bummed, I don't know what to do.
I guess my best plan of action would be to first pump out the water from the floating pond shell, and then remove it. Next, I should probably either try to pump the remaining water out of the hole, or maybe just let it soak into the ground and evaporate. Then, I'll have to remove the sludge that was the sand and backfill dirt. And then start with new sand and backfilling all over again.
So here are my questions:
-Would this be the best thing to do?
-Did the hole flood and make the pond form float because I did not have the pond form completely full of water (it was only about 1/2 full at the time)?
-What would keep the same thing from happening the next time it rains? Or would it NOT have happened if the pond was completely full of water and completely backfilled?
-I'm planning on adding a coping of flat, slate-like stones around the edge which should help keep water from draining into the pond hole once it's complete. Will this keep the pond from floating again?
-I guess in retrospect I should have covered the unfinished pond with a tarp, but I didn't even think about it, and have never read that one should do so in ANY of my pond books.
-In case anyone wants to know, the area where I dug the pond is flat- water doesn't drain down a slope or anything into the area.

Many, many thanks to anyone who can offer me advice and words of encouragement. I'm really discouraged at this point.
-Christina


Last edited by wonder woman at 06-May-2005 15:39

Just continue with your plans as once you have it in the ground and backfilled, then filled with water it's not going to float again. You may also wan't to dig the hole just a bit deeper and fill with gravel then the leveling sand as this will help with rainwater drainage in the future.

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

Gravel- good idea! It doesn't really rain much here, but when it does, it pours, and it doesn't help that the soil doesn't seem to drain well. It's very clay-like about 1-2' down.

Like you, we have clay-like soil that doesn't drain well, and we had a similar problem with one side of a pre-fab pond we installed a few years ago. My husband ended up digging a trough along one side of the pond and filling it with gravel, which gave added support. I seem to recall he also ran some PVC pipe under the gravel, with the other end poking out a bit of a dropoff that we had about five feet beyond the pond. That way, the water would perk down through the gravel and the excess would run into the pipe and drain away. It worked really well. (We've since replace the prefab with a much larger liner pond.)

Don't worry -- when setting up ponds, most of us run into one sort of problem or another, and and end up improvising all sorts of solutions. Eventually, it will all get straightened out and working fine ... which is right around the time you decide that you just have to have a larger pond.

Last edited by lmuha at 06-May-2005 17:40