We built a water garden with a galvanized stock tank. Would I do it again? Eh...
Hi, I'm Tim. Welcome to the Shades of Green Show. As you can see,
we just finished construction of our water garden here at the nursery.
Uh, this is in a spot well, right behind me, used to be a much larger pond.
And when the nursery was built 25 years ago,
it was filled with water lilies and fish, and it looked gorgeous.
But that's because the creek behind us was just a trickle with almost no
wildlife in it. But as the area has developed,
it has become a watershed for some of the subdivisions around here,
and the creek has a lot more water flowing through it these days,
which means we have a lot more turtles. And in the last, uh, seven to 10 years,
the turtles would come up over the bank and take up residence in the pond that
was here and they devoured everything.
We couldn't have any plants or any fish of any kind because we had four or five
massive turtles in the thing. Uh,
I did a video talking about this a few years ago. So because of that,
and because it was just a giant puddle of murky water,
and because we really needed the floor space to put more plants on to service,
uh, our increasing customer base, we decided to fill that pond in.
But we always get asked if we sell aquatics and well,
we didn't have a place to put them or do, or, or, display them.
So we lost that pond.
We decided to put in a new water garden and start selling aquatic plants.
We found a great grower that specializes in native Texas bog plants and
aquatics, which are, uh, for sale now here in the troughs behind me. So,
thus began the odyssey of creating a water garden. And I thought, okay,
over the years, I guess I built my first water garden in 1998.
And I've probably built about nine since then. Uh,
some were slightly above ground and, and slightly below ground.
Some were totally above ground.
And a third of them were your classic dig a hole, put in a rubber liner,
circle it with rocks, and put that in. So I've done.
'em lots of different ways over the years. And, uh,
we had several design issues that we wanted to address. First of all,
the turtles. So we figured, "Hey, if we have an 18 inch high rock wall,
the turtles probably won't get into this pond." So we started out with that.
I came up with the design, which I thought was pretty straightforward,
but something was lost in translation.
And this should have been eight foot square interior,
but somehow the plans that I gave to the contractor and one of our managers,
they made it 10 feet inside. And here's what that means. So,
had our little concrete area been built eight feet interior dimensions,
the, uh,
edges of this round stock tank would just be touching it on all the sides.
And these long troughs would be up on the sides here, perfectly level,
which would also give me about a one foot drop, um,
from these tanks into the main tank.
That would give me a lot more oxygenation in the water because that longer pour,
the water would plunge deeper. We'd get more bubbles,
more aeration in the water, which is what I had intended. But, uh,
what happened was I gave the plans, gave my instructions,
went home for the weekend. I come back.
Foundation is already poured and they're halfway through putting up all walls.
Too late. So here we are.
I'll go through all the plumbing in a minute,
cuz I know every pond video I've ever watched I wanna know,
what about the pump?. What about the filtration?
But starting off here with our big round tank, uh, leveling,
it was the biggest challenge.
And somehow we managed cuz we had a layer of river rock.
We had a layer of decomposed granite.
We had a layer of pea gravel and then we had this hard black clay,
which we have all over north Texas,
which you basically have to have a pick ax to get down into. Uh, but thanks to,
uh, the help of our Assistant Manager, Charlie,
we were able to get this eight foot span level within an eighth of an inch from
side to side at every angle. We were so happy. We were so proud.
Here at Shades of Green, we have some giant Cottonwood trees.
We have one that's a Champion Tree,
meaning it's the largest of its species in the city of Frisco.
And it drops seed every May.
There are days here in May where it's sunny and warm and it's like it's snowing.
And if you have allergies, you'll find out in a hurry. So our drains here,
these are made for sinks cuz uh,
I didn't want to use bulkhead fittings. I didn't wanna use plastic or PVC.
If I'm gonna go with the metal look, I wanted to go metal all the way around.
And I needed to get from here to there with something that wasn't plastic.
So these are sink drains that I bought off the shelf at Lowe's.
But they had little holes in them, obviously,
to catch things and keep 'em from falling down the sink.
And the day we put 'em in, Charlie said,
"Do you think we need to drill those out? They might clog." I said, "Nah,
we'll be fine." Well,
that was the exact day that the Cottonwood started dropping and the little
floaties landed in the water. They clogged up the holes overnight.
We had a back, uh, the water backed up.
It flowed over the backside and basically emptied the main tank.
And so for a point in time, there was more water under this tank than in it.
And it floated and that shifted.
So we went from being almost near perfect level to being off by about an inch
and a quarter to an inch and a half from side to side.
What are you gonna do? Uh, I have, uh, dubbed this "Lake Coulda' beenbetter,"
which I think is an ancient Comanche term, meaning,
"things went wrong." That was one of them. We should have drilled out the holes,
uh, on the, uh, sink drains,
which we have since done and everything's working great. Uh,
digging this, removing everything and making it perfectly level again,
you know, this project has taken four months to complete because we are a fully
operational nursery. We've got customers coming and going.
We've got plants being delivered all the, all the time.
So all the work that's been done on this has been before we open and after we
close and we're now into April. We said, we've gotta get this done.
So we decided to just leave it un-level and go with it.
So that's part of the saga there. Uh, had it been built to the correct size,
I would've had a little smaller planting bed.
I'm trying to look at this as a positive.
Now that we have these larger flower bed areas on all the corners,
we have more room to plant stuff. We have a hardy hibiscus here. We have some,
uh, Creeping Jenny down there, which is gonna be a low growing ground cover.
We have a, um, a, uh, elephant ear that we've rescued in the corner.
it was found in a neglected corner, had been abandoned and forgotten,
so we're trying to bring it back to life back here.
And then over here in this corner, uh, this is Powdery Alligator Flag,
Thalia dealbata. This was growing along the bank of our old pond.
So this is kinda like an homage to the pond that used to be here.
This is gonna get about four to five feet tall and should fill in this whole
space. And as we were finishing construction on this,
we found this just popping up over here on what used to be the bank of the
old pond. So let me give you a quick tour of the plumbing here.
So when all the tanks are full, um, again,
these are all off-the-shelf stock tanks from Tractor Supply Company.
When they're all full and running at capacity, like they are now,
we're running at about 900 gallons. I have a 620 gallon, uh,
per hour pump. Uh, there's a lot of debate among pond builders.
Do you wanna run the entire volume of water through your filter every hour?
Do you wanna do half of it?
I personally like to go somewhere between half and a third. 900 gallons.
600 gallon pump. I'm running two thirds of the water through every cycle.
A little bit more than I want, but it seems to be working. So this is our,
gonna be our plant filter. It's filled with, uh,
Hydroton and Geolite, which is LECA. That is, uh,
the, uh,
light expanded clay aggregate L E C A. That's what that is.
Uh, the main difference is the Geolite tends to float and the Hydroton tends to
sink. And I built, uh, bog filters before using,
uh, river rock, uh, or, uh, pea gravel. Really heavy, um,
takes up a, a, a lot of weight. I've also done it with a lava rock,
which is very popular. The, they are porous uh, those pores,
and that's everyone says, oh, you got they're porous,
you got a lot of surface area. Well, those pores get clogged pretty quick.
And river rock is rough on your hands.
You've gotta wear leather gloves to handle it, or you're gonna get chewed up.
So I decided to go with the, uh, the clay pebbles, cuz they're light.
You still get some surface area. And uh, uh, this is gonna provide, uh,
just a, a little more something for the roots of the plants to grab onto.
I've got money wort here. I've got some Creeping Jenny,
I'll be putting a few other things in here.
And then I have these two stand pipes.
The water is coming out of the main tank into the, uh,
the filter here. It's going in opposite directions, spinning around the pipes.
Uh, on top of those,
I put these little stainless steel screens that are used for washing machines to
keep drier, to keep lint from the clothes going down the drain and clogging it.
So I put those on the ends of the hose because if the pump goes off,
we'll start a backflow situation where we'll have a siphon effect and this will
start pulling water outta this tank.
And I don't want all my little clay pebbles going down my hose.
So that was the reason for these stainless steel, um,
mesh screens on the ends of the hoses. From there,
it comes outta these standpipes and drops down into Smart Pots.
These are grow bags. They're cloth. They're made to fill with potting soil,
grow a potato or a tomato or whatever you want in it. It'll let water through,
but it'll hold the soil in. And at the end of the season, you dump it,
rinse it out, fold it up and put it in your garage.
So I decided, well, I'm gonna fill these with bio ribbon.
I started using this over 20 years ago. I think it's a great filter media.
I don't see it talked about all that much, but I think it's wonderful. Uh,
this little thin ribbon,
it's got all these little facets on both sides and that creates a lot of surface
area for the beneficial bacteria to colonize and grow.
And I've got one here and one on the other side. So the water comes down.
It drops down the stand pipe, picking up lots of oxygen as it goes,
goes into the bag here. I've got these in a,
this is simply a mesh laundry bag. This was probably 15 years old.
I used it on another pond a long time ago. So that's holding all the,
uh, bio ribbon in it tight. Everything's dropping down into there.
It's doing that on both sides. From there.
It just seeps through the sides of the bags goes through here.
These are the plants that are for sale.
And then out our dual exhaust drain system, which I've got on both sides.
And that completes the, uh, the circuit.
So the pump from the main pond up into this one.
Fills this where I'm gonna have the,
the roots of the plants doing most of the filtration.
Water's gonna drop down in here. It's going to feed, uh, the, uh,
bacteria in the, uh, grow bags.
Then go through one more set of plants and then back into the pond. And again,
this is brand new.
We haven't really added fish or anything yet those will be coming in the next
week. And this was filled with pond water,
cuz all of our water hoses here are run from the back pond,
which is about 16 feet, deep ton of water.
Any nursery that's gonna use city water is gonna go broke.
So we collect rainwater and we run all of our water hoses off of pond water.
So this should balance itself out pretty quickly because it's already been
sitting in a pond for a long time.
One tip that I picked up from watching lots of YouTube videos about how other
people turned stock tanks into water gardens was to put a layer or a coat
of liquid rubber in the tanks. And I did that on all four of these tanks.
I put two very thick coats of liquid rubber down.
That'll help reinforce the joints should give you a little longer lifespan, uh,
make the tanks a little bit more durable. I will say that it's messy stuff. Uh,
it goes on brown by the way,
at least the product that I use went on brown and then dried black.
So those first couple of strokes I was freaking out that I'd bought the wrong
color. Also,
the instructions on the product will tell you that you can clean the brushes.
I didn't find that to be true. Didn't seem to matter what I did.
I just had a gunky gooey mess.
So I ended up buying the cheapest brushes I could use or I could find,
and I would put a coat down and throw that brush in the trash. Cause I,
I just couldn't get, uh, a brush to, uh, get clean enough to be used again.
So bear that in mind. It's messy stuff, sticky stuff.
Wear clothes that you'll never wanna wear again or that you can throw away. Uh,
but uh, I did that.
I think it was a wise choice and we'll see how it pans out.
So we shot the first half of this video on a Sunday and then the store opened
and we didn't have a chance to finish. It's now five days later,
I've added some fish. We have three koi in here,
the butterfly coy with the long fins, which I really love.
And we've also got three goldfish, and with three of each,
chances are we've got a male and a female. So we might have more here very,
very soon. This is our pond. Uh, I opened with a question,
"Would I do it this way again?
Would I build a pond with a stock tank?" And the answer is maybe.
If I could set it on a perfectly level concrete slab, that would be great.
If I could put it in place and then build the wall around it,
that would be easier. I might even consider one of the, uh,
bottomless stock tanks where you just have to get the edges level and then you
go in and put in a liner. Uh, again,
this is the first time I've ever built a pond like this with a stock tank.
Doing it with a liner you can get away with a lot of mistakes.
You don't have to have a perfectly level bottom.
You can hide a lot of things with a rubber liner. Uh,
but this certainly has its place. And uh,
I certainly had lots of room to plant in these corners once this thing was built
a little bigger than it was planned. So anyway,
feel free to come by Shades of Green Nursery & Landscape in Frisco, Texas,
and check this out anytime you want. Uh,
the lilies are getting bigger now that it's getting hot. And uh,
I think by the end of the year, this, this will really start looking nice.
I'm Tim and as always, thanks for watching the Shades of Green Show.