article: Concrete and the Water Garden

Concrete and the Water Garden

Creating and detailing your water garden does include a few choices of what types of materials you would like to use. As when building any other type of structure on your land, your choice of materials, what you like to work with the most, and the price of the materials are going to come into play. Concrete can be expensive if you are creating a larger size pond, but in the end you may well like the overall look much more than a preformed pond liner.

Concrete that you use to make your pond is going to be made of a mixture of sand, gravel, water and cement. You may have also run across the term mortar when talking about building with stone and block, but mortar doesn’t have any stones or rocks in the mixture.

If this is your first time using concrete as a project that you are going to work on yourself, you might want to consider building a small bird bath or much smaller water feature and then moving up to the larger sized water garden when you are comfortable working with this type of material. (Not to mention when you have gotten all the tools you need!)

You will need to start your project when the frost and freezing temperatures has passes, so that the concrete will not crack while it sets up hard. You might also want to consider working with the concrete early in the morning before the high heat of the day comes along and sets your concrete faster than you can work with it.

When using concrete, you will need wire mesh, chicken wire, or a reinforcing mesh that will hold the concrete in place, where it will not sink through holes as easy into the dirt or into rocks.

If you are making your own concrete, it will be important to use clean rock, not rock that you have scooped from the ditch in the driveway because the clean stone will stick to the concrete mix, where additional dirt could make the stone loose in the concrete mix as it dries making cracks and holes a real possibility.

When starting on a large project involving concrete, be sure to tackle the entire concrete project needs all at the same time, this may mean that you need additional help in forming your water garden but forming the concrete all at one time means you will have less of a chance of cracks at a later date as the concrete dries completely.