Hello, and welcome to my blog!
We've had a pond in our front yard for several years now. In past years, we've used heavy black plastic for a pond liner. It doesn't hold up well compared to the heavy rubber pond liners, but it costs way less, so that's what we went with in the past.
Last year, in early winter, one of the local neighborhood deer walked across the freshly frozen pond and fell through the ice, punching a hole through the liner with a hoof. Of course, that meant we had to replace the liner before we could fill the pond and put the goldfish back in it this year.
This year, instead of going the cheap way with more heavy plastic for the liner, we decided to put a large stock watering tank in the hole. These tanks are very durable and can handle most of the abuse that horses and cattle give them, so they also make an excellent hard pond liner. The main limitation with these stock tanks is the sizes and shapes that you can get them in. Also, they're not cheap.
We chose to replace the pond liner with a 300 gallon stock tank. It's longer than it is wide, with rounded ends.
This is the old pond that the tank is going into. The tank is almost as wide as the hole, and deeper, but not as long.
The first thing we had to do was remove the landscape blocks from around the edge of the pond. They were holding down the edge of the liner. After that, we were able to pull out the old liner sheet plastic. The hole needed to be modified to fit the tank, including digging the hole slightly deeper and flattening the bottom of the hole for the tank bottom. Getting the plastic out of the hole was a pain in the butt because of all of the mud and leaf debris in the bottom of the pond. It was rather heavy.
After getting the plastic out of the hole, we could see a channel in the dirt that was made by the water draining out of the pond through the hole in the liner.
The next step was digging out the area for the stock tank to go into. That big rock is there because we don't have the means to remove it. It became an ornamental rock because of that.
After leveling off the bottom of the hole and tamping it down, we put the tank in the hole and got it level and fitted in place. I had already started backfilling around the tank when I remembered to take a picture. We filled the tank to that level with water from the rain water catchment tank.
The tank is quite a bit smaller than the pond was, but it will be large enough for the fish that will be going into it soon. We're going to have to haul some dirt around to the front yard to finish filling in the rest of the hole to ground level. There's also some landscaping to do around the tank once the hole is filled in. We're going to put the landscape blocks back around the tank, and we might decide to construct a bit of a waterfall for the tank at some point this coming summer.
I would have liked to have gotten a larger tank, but the larger plastic ones are round and wouldn't fit in the hole, at least the ones that I've seen. At least the deer can't damage this tank by stepping in it. This pond should last for many years.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!