[certain-death]

Hi,

Wondering if anyone has any advice on building a self cleaning duck pond. We’ve wanted to put a reasonable pond in for ages but the cleanliness has always deterred me from starting.

Ideally I’d like something low maintenance.

My current idea is to have the pond located in the field in front of our house. The house/Garden are elevated above the field by about 2m, I was thinking I could pump water from the pond to the top of the slope then have a stream carrying water back into the pond. I was hoping with the right selection of plants in/around the stream we could create a bio filter effectively.

At the moment we have 5 geese and 3 ducks, in the future the duck count is likely to increase (maybe to between 6-10) and geese decrease.

I was thinking a pond size of about 3x4M with a depth of about 1M if that sounds sufficient ?

Any help/ advice would be appreciated, I’d like to try and get this project off the ground since we have a bit more time on our hands this year.

TIA

[doganjo]

A friend with a digger dug one for me.  Just a plain hole, a metre and a half deep, stepped ledges, and about 3 metres diameter, no lining needed as it filled up as he was digging it. It went up and down with teh water table, and was a great sump if there was a sudden downpour
I tried putting in plants to keep it sweet but my 6 ducks either ate them or trashed them.  I tried a solar powered pump to turn the water over but they trashed that too.  Eventually I just left them to it.  It was partially in shade so sometimes there was pond weed, but I raked that out and left it to dry on the side.  They had great fun playing with that and finding beasties to eat.  It never seemed to get smelly as they churcned it up so much, but when I moved and the new owners wanted it filled in because thy had a toddler we discovered that it was only a couple of feet deep, with sludge at the bottom - the ducks (and probably helped by my hens) had taken all the earth down from the sides - I hadn't noticed it had got wider