Disaster!

Apologies for not being around peoples' blogs much these past few weeks - life got a little bit hectic and something had to give!

Anyway, back to my disaster...........!

Last July I was merrily pootling my way up the garden to pick some fruit and veg for tea a couple of weeks after the purlin ring had been put onto the tea house roof when I became aware of a strange buzzing noise working its way into my happy little world. Wandering up past the bottom pond in search of the source of the noise, I became aware that something was amiss;

The bottom pond was empty!!!!

The buzzing was the pump pumping fresh air. Whaaah!

This discovery resulted in a brief outburst of a chorus of the Yorkshire swearing song interspersed with wails of "where's all the water gone?" as I danced up and down in panic! This was NOT a happy dance, I can tell you!

(For those who don't know it, the chorus goes "bugger, bugger, pig, sod, sh*t, sod, damn"!)

I searched around, but to no avail - I just couldn't find where the water had gone. The top pond was still full, nowhere seemed boggy or soggy ...... it had well and truly vanished! I went in search of Himself, Master of Mysteries, to see if he could shed any light onto things!

Himself, having a pessimistic outlook on life (- although he claims it's realistic) immediately decided that there must be a leak in the big top pond. I pointed out that as he hadn't dropped anything sharp into the pond ....had he?, that couldn't be the reason. (nice speedy deflection of potential blame there I thought!).

I don't normally leave the stream running during the week when I'm not around, but I'd forgotten to turn it off the previous Sunday and it had been running constantly for 5 days - so I had no idea how long the pond had been empty. Himself then added in a very satisfactory worry about whether or not the pump would be wrecked from running without water flowing through it. I reckoned that, as it's a German pump, it'd be fine!

We both spent a restless night trying to figure out what had happened. Himself was holding firm on his belief that we'd have to strip out the top pond to find a leak (see - told you he was a pessimist!), but I was convinced that there was another cause - ever the optimist and trying desperately to avoid emptying the top pond of its 5000 litres of water!

The following morning showed that the top pond water level hadn't changed : QED, no leak in there (phew!). Then I remembered Ower Dave!

When Ower Dave had come to help, I'd shouted at him for walking up the stream bed - something along the lines of "gerrof me stream yer gret daft wombat!" (Translation = "please come out of my stream you silly person!"). He'd claimed that dry stream beds were just paths by another name ... too much walking up Kinder Scout Downfall and Grindsbrook together when we were younger had obviously left its mark!

All of the top pond and most of the stream has solid support under the edges of the butyl lining. The only bit that hasn't is ......... the bit of the stream where the beach is! That's just got a thin aluminium strip under it to give it some rigidity.

I reckoned that Ower Dave had marched his great clod-hopping boots right over the stones and pushed down the liner and either bent it (hopefully) or ripped it on a sharp edge (please no!). So I shifted all the stones on his possible short-cut and, after a few minutes of serious breath-holding, found that he had indeed squashed the edge, but hadn't ripped the butyl - thankfully!

The lowered edge was then below the water level of the stream and meant that the constantly running water had been able to leach its way through the stones into the moss and soil and soak invisibly away - until there wasn't enough water left to create a flow.

Much relieved by my discovery, I then cleaned out the bottom pond. Yes, I know that technically it's still just a big hole with liner in it but in my imagination it's a finished pond!!!

This summer......! :)

Anyway, I spent considerable time removing water snails, frogs and other small aquatic beasties from the pond before cleaning all the gunk out of the bottom. Very smelly and not the pleasantest of tasks - and not aided by this frog who came back FOUR times after I'd carefully deposited him in the top pond - daft creature!

I gave up and kept him in this tub where I could keep an eye on him!

I then faced up to fixing the stream bed instead of procrastinating! I dug out the soil to give me a clear area to work, unfolded the butyl, rebuilt the edging using stones instead of the aluminium strip, refolded the butyl liner down over the stones then replaced the soil, holding the new edging securely in place. I set the stream running to check that I'd not missed any tiny tears - which I hadn't, and to prove to Himself that the pump was fine - which it was! German you know. Dead good!

Once I was happy with that, I started to replace the beach - putting in some bigger stones to support the edging should some plonk with big feet decided to walk up it again!

I left the stream running constantly for a couple of days to see if the levels dropped - which they didn't, before I put the finishing touches to the stream, adding the stones and pebbles to hide the liner and spill over onto the moss .......... you'd never know I'd been messing about with it would you?!

Stream running beautifully - even if the bit below the bridge still isn't finished!

Then Autumn came and all my hard work was covered up..........

What idiot wanted to build ponds under a load of trees eh?!

The pond and island yesterday -and, yes, the moss really is that green! A combination of all that snow and lots of rain has been very good for it this winter!

And a perfect way to end the day!

The start of the REAL stream building!

Digging out the stream was done in stages - it was hard work and always seemed to involve me needing to go where piles of rocks happened to already be, thus necessitating yet another round of rock shifting! By the time I'd finished the stream I'd finally gotten quite good at moving the rocks to somewhere completely out of the way - although heaven only knows why I couldn't have worked that out earlier!

Digging out the top part of the stream: The route and the shape of the stream opening from the waterfall went through various manifestations before I was satisfied that I'd got it looking 'right'. I'd originally planned to have a promenentary at one side of the waterfall for a granite lantern to stand on, but this would have caused me to have a sharp bend in the stream and when I marked it out with my trusty hosepipe length I wasn't happy with it, so reverted to a more linear exit from the pond and a smoother curve on the stream - but I will find somewhere to put a lantern near the water before I'm finished!

Below is the stream completely dug out, with the bottom bridge roughly in the right place and the bottom pond hole with its temporary liner - bearing in mind that this is last summer (2008) and the bottom pond STILL looks like this ...........temporary takes on a whole new meaning with this project!

We then laid down the fleece underliner and the butyl top liner down the length of the streambed, making sure that any overlaps overlapped on the downhill side before we glued it! We used a special waterproof glue that still works even when the butyl is damp or even under water - essential in case of leaks, not that there would be any given Himself's meticulous work.

My original idea for the stream had the water cascading at speed down to the bottom pond, but when we tested out the waterfall before I'd fully finished off all the digging and levelling I found that I actually quite liked the accidental look we had achieved of a shallow pool between the pond and the top bridge - and decided to keep it like that!

The accidental pool from below!

To be continued...... well we didn't do the stream in just one day!

Building the waterfall and stream .......at last!

I'm bone tired, I've got mysterious bruises all over my legs, my hands don't want to work properly and my get-up-and-go has completely scarpered. It must be Monday morning!

Why do I never learn? Why don't I stop shifting soil, moving rocks or whatever half an hour before exhaustion sets in, rather than just after?!Why do I continue to delude myself that I have the fitness and energy levels of a 22 year old when every Monday my body tells me otherwise?!

ANYWAY! Enough of feeling sorry for myself - it was totally self-inflicted and does not deserve sympathy, SO, back to last summer.......waterfall and stream building, yeah! The summer of '08 was not the best British summer we've ever had! It tipped it down a lot of the time - but there were some good days and we grabbed them with both hands.

Before the waterfall stone could be put in place I had to dig out the stream route so that Himself could see the angle the stone needed to be set at in the pond side. My red sweatshirt is on the main island stone. The stream will curve round behind the island before curving back towards the right to flow down to the bottom pond.



Himself was allowed to build ONE straight wall in the pond - which was to be under the waterfall stone and, therefore, completely hidden!

The water in the pond was held back by one of our chunky wooden beams which was long enough to reach right across the pond and to have the butyl liner and fleece liner draped back over it. The light grey fabric is the fleece liner. It was all kept in place by a couple of random bits of stone carefully plonked on top!



Himself had replaced the original waterfall stone after it had broken in two after being accidentaly dropped when being moved. The photo below shows the original stone, with its nice curved shape - but, apparently, it was a pig to place and get level........ Hmm, was the breakage really an accident?!!



There are no photos of Himself laying the new waterfall stone as I was off doing something else at the time, so wasn't around to take photos!

Once the stone was levelled to Himself's wonderfully perfectionist standards and satisfaction, it had to be tested to check that the water would flow evenly over all its width. Himself and the ever magnificent Pete roughly laid both liners down the stream bed and into the bottom pond, which was then filled by hosepipe until there was enough water to be pumped up to the fill the top pond whilst still leaving a decent level in the bottom pond. (You can tell from the description who worked out all the technical details like flow rate etc - and it wasn't me!)



The new posh German pump was turned on and we stood with baited breath as the top pond water level slowly rose and began to trickle smoothly and SO evenly over the waterfall and into the stream bed. Shouts of joy (me!) and amazement (Himself!) could be heard across Chesterfield.
Pete just laughed at us!



The water looks brackish because it had been sitting in the pond for several weeks with no filter system and there is reflected light from all the trees that surround it, but it wasn't quite as bad as it looks in the photo - honest!

The water then burbled, gurgled and flowed its way merrily down the proto-stream until it finally fell into the bottom pond for the very first time. I was well giddy by this point and nearly toppled into the bottom pond in my excitement!



Another excellent weekend's work!

How to do things in the wrong order!

Having filled the pond up, we had a few minor(!) crises when we realised that:

1. we hadn't dug the stream out properly

2. we hadn't put the waterfall stone in

3. Himself was convinced the side walls of the pond were about to collapse at any minute

4. we had got a large amount of water lapping up against where we needed to work

NOT one of our better moments!

Himself had an "it's all doomed" moment and I had a major hissy fit, resulting in a brief but loud rant at poor old Himself along the totally non-PC lines of "thick people build ponds, it's can't be SO difficult, what IS your problem?!!!". I did apologise very profusely later on.

I then set about emptying the pond with a trug and chucking all the water on the veg patch. Himself, being the more sensible less volatile one, built a temporary holding tank on the lawn and drained the water into that instead until the water level was down to shelf level.

We bought some plastic coated corrugated panels (meant for roofs, I think), cut them to size, used a plank to fold the liners over and clear where we needed to work then put the pond sized panels in place and back-filled with soil.

Himself working a panel into place near the mouth of where the stream will be.

The plank holding the liners out of the way.

Himself then built a wall to rest the waterfall stone securely on. The poor love tried so hard to put straight lines into the pond, all of which I refused to have and promptly removed on the grounds that natural ponds don't have straight lines. His wall was the only straight bit in the whole pond - and it got covered up once the mortar was dry - but he was happy because he knows it's there!

I got busy digging out the route for the stream. The group of rocks in front of me with my red sweatshirt on are the island. The stream route meanders between the island and all the other rocks behind me. No straight lines for me!

The Nutty Gnome mid-action.

Himself putting the waterfall stone in place. We had aquired the stone from a friend's garden. It looked great because it had been shaped by something/someone to have a gentle sloping curve in the middle - ideal for water to trickle over and look like it had worn the stone away over the millenia. It was taken in and out several times to get the height and levels perfect. Unfortunately, on one move, it was accidentally dropped and cracked in half down the middle. Himself was mortified.

I went to the local stone yard and scrambled about on their rejects pile until I found the perfect new waterfall stone - for a quid! (A quid is £1 or approximately $1.60). Bargain!