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Until we actually made our pond here at Wiggly Wigglers, ponds seemed a complicated project to me. All those decisions... where to put it; fish or no fish; pump or no pump; liner or no liner; so many possibilities!
However, once you decide that it’s a wildlife pond you want, things get a lot easier: nature has made all the hard decisions for you. Best of all making a wildlife pond means you don’t need to buy all of those extras that the aquatic centre wants to sell you. You don’t need any fish (they’ll eat your frogspawn and your newts), you don’t need a pump (you’re not making a water feature or a fish pond) and you don’t need a fibreglass liner - their shapes just aren’t as natural as making your own.
I’m glad to report that pond building is really rewarding. The result is almost instant and the benefits to your local wildlife are fantastic. Obviously you’ll get lots of new insects, in the 
first full year of our new pond we had dragonflies and damsel flies galore, but the spin offs are just as good. We watched house martins for hours as they collected mud from the pond’s edge to build their nests in the eaves. We had visiting moorhens and coots as well as dozens of frogs which went on tour in the wildlife meadow.
Making your pond the Wiggly Way.
Obviously we can’t dig the hole for you but we can help with everything else needed to produce a wonderful wildlife pond; check out the Ponds category in the Shop. Nature will supply the wildlife, and more quickly than you could ever imagine.
Siting your pond
Any pond is better than no pond, so don’t worry too much about where it needs to be... put it where you will enjoy it. If you can provide some shade all the better but avoid siting directly under a tree because its roots might cause you problems (and its falling leaves definitely will). Decide on the size of your pond and mark it out on the ground by sprinkling a line of sand or laying out a hosepipe or some rope. For a natural shape go for a slightly wiggly oval.
Unless your ground is a thick impervious clay, it is important to line your pond with a waterproof layer. There are several types of material on the market which you could try but most experts agree that the final choice is between relaxing beside a deluxe, butyl rubber lined pond or continuously repairing the holes in a pond lined with one of the cheaper alternatives. To protect the liner from stones you can use a layer of old carpet or sand under the butyl sheet. Our Pond Packs use geotextile.
If a layer of geotextile under the butyl helps protect it against stones, then another layer of geotextile, this time on top of the butyl, helps the soil to adhere to the sloping edges.
Get digging!
Bearing in mind that you are going to place a layer of soil on top of your liner you’ll need to dig the whole of your pond around 150mm deeper than you want the finished pond to be. But just how deep should a wildlife pond be?
Most importantly, you’ll need a fairly deep area in the middle of your pond so that wildlife can survive under the thickest ice during the winter. As this deep area needs to be at least 600mm deep you should dig the deepest part to at least 750mm. Greater depths, of up to 1.25 metres are fine.
The ideal profile for a pond is a shallow saucer so, to reach the necessary depth, a pond should ideally be quite wide. Make a sloping edge around a quarter of your pond so that wildlife has an easy ramp to enter the pond by, but remember to leave plenty of shallow ledges around the rest. These ledges, the tops of which should be from just below the final water level water level to 300mm or so deep, are where you will plant your marginal plants. The more shallow ledges you have the more space you will have for plants, so don’t skimp.
Lining the pond
Now it’s time to fill the pond with water. Don’t do what we did at Wiggly Wigglers which was to drop the hosepipe in the bottom and turning it on full blast. Why not? Because you’ll end up with a mud bath which takes several weeks to settle. Instead, get a spare bit of your matting or old carpet and let the hosepipe water trickle gently over that. If you can use spring water or water from a rain butt all the better but, in any case, try to pop in a bucketful of water from an established pond if possible.
That’s the hard bit done. Your pond needs a rest for a few days to let the chlorine from your tap water clear, and I expect you will too. The fun bit is coming: start choosing the plants that you’d like from our range of native pond plants and marginals or, for value and simplicity, match up one of our Pond Plant Packs to the pond size.
