If you have always wanted a water feature in your back yard but didn’t want to spend a fortune or hire someone to do it this may be just what you are looking for. A diy project that you can finish in a weekend and end up with both a small pond and a waterfall. You can add water plants for a lush tropical look and the dirt you dig out for the pond will be used behind the waterfall as a berm. Family Handyman shares the instructions and pictures for building your backyard pond with waterfall and since it only take a weekend to build it you will still have a lot of summer left to enjoy it.
When choosing the plants you will use in your pond, if you live where the winter is harsh you will probably empty your pond for the winter and you will either need to store your plants inside in buckets or replace them every year so do some research before deciding which plants to use. Then you can decide if they are worth keeping indoors over winter or if a little more affordable plants may be better to replace every year. If you live where there are no harsh winters ( I am jealous) you can probably choose which ever plants you like the most. Filtration of your pond can be done in a few different ways but I like the idea of the biological filtration that other than sloshing the filters around in a bucket of pond water are basically maintenance free.
For mosquito control you have a variety of choices. You can add gold fish or guppies and both will eat mosquito larvae. Koi fish while beautiful will not eat mosquito larvae. Tadpoles are a great choice because they live on mosquito larvae and they grow up to be frogs or toads and will then eat adult mosquitos, flies, gnats and other insects. The world needs more frogs, but they need to have a place to get out of the water once they have fully developed or they will drown.
If you would rather not have any living things in the pond there are products you can buy such as Mosquito Bits or Mosquito dunks and add to the water. As a side not these are good for rain barrels too. So if you build yours this weekend you can invite your friends over to admire your amazing pond and waterfall next weekend.
