YOU CAN BUILD A CONCRETE POND IN YOUR BACK YARD (AND HAVE AGREAT TIME DOING IT)!

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Last year at this time here in northern California, there was a severe drought . . . or so I'm told. While other folks were cutting down on the number of baths they took and letting their garden plants wither in the blazing summer sun, I was irrigating my vegetables freely and frequently ... using the water that was stored in our 6'deep by 40'-wide "built it ourselves" concrete pond.

Now I admit, digging a 10,000-or 15,000-gallon hole in the ground and lining it with four inches of concrete is an ambitious undertaking. But it can be done (and, perhaps, should be done if you need extra water for irrigation, aquaculture, swimming, or firefighting). All it takes is some advance planning, $600 to $800 in materials, and a little help from 15 or 20 friends.

BEGIN WITH A LEVEL SITE

Ideally, you should plan to have your pond dug with a front-end loader, rather than a backhoe (which will leave a rough surface that must be smoothed out by hand) ... and if the site isn't level, it should be graded first. After that you can dig your pond in whatever shape the lay of the land allows. Our pond (see drawing) has a generally ovoid cross section, with a flat bottom and sides that slope at 45° (except near the top, where they flatten out to an incline of only 10°).

When the excavation work is completed, survey your private "water hole" carefully and level its rim with itself all the way around, then make a slight dip in the edge where the overflow or spillway is to be. We didn't do this as carefully as we should have, and—as a result—our minilake's overflow is nearly a full foot lower than the rest of the pond's rim. (This seems like a waste of concrete and space now, because a good deal of surface area near the spillway never even gets wet . . . except during a rain.) On the side of the pond opposite the overflow, there's a slight hill (see drawings) against which we built a sort of retaining wall. (This wall—like the excess concrete area around the spillway—helps funnel extra water into the pond during a rainstorm.)

Be sure, too—when excavation is complete—to remove all loose dirt from the freshly dug hole. This was easy enough for us to do: The tractor driver we hired was more than happy to [1) leave his tractor at the bottom of the pit, with the boom down, while we shoveled dirt into the bucket . . . then [2] drive around the top of the pond to pack down any remaining loose soil. When he was done, we took still more dirt out by hand (in pails) and smoothed out rough spots before wetting and tamping down the loose fill along the 'pond's rim.

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