Few sounds are more soothing than moving water. Just thinking of water splashing over a rock ledge is enough for me to start relaxing. Though often considered a luxury item, water features can fit into most homeowner’s budgets. You just have to pick the right kind.
You don’t need a lot of space or a pond to have a beautiful water feature in your yard. And you can make all the ones on this list yourself, though it’s usually easy to find a contractor if you don’t have the time or there’s a part of the DIY that you’d rather not do yourself. For example, you might want an electrician to do the wiring for outside electrical sources or a landscaper to set up the reservoir for a pondless waterfall.
Container Water Garden
This project won’t tear up any of your existing landscape, so it’s perfect if you’re renting or if you don’t have much space (click here for a tutorial). All you need is a waterproof container that holds at least 15 gallons of water. Keep in mind that water weighs about 8 pounds per gallon, so make sure wherever you place the container is sturdy enough to support it. If you want water movement, add a small pump or bubbler.
You can fill your water garden with a variety of aquatic plants. If you place it in full sun, you can even grow small water lilies in a container water garden. You can also add fish to your water garden. For containers on the small side, tropical fish like guppies or platys will work. In containers larger than 20 gallons, you can keep one or two small goldfish. Plants and fish will need to be moved inside over winter.
Fountain Pot
Small fountains and bubblers require a little more work to set up, but they’re just as easy to maintain as a water garden and you don’t have to worry about caring for plants or fish. For this project, you’ll set up a water reservoir underneath a pot and then use tubing through the base of the pot to connect with a pump. The pump moves water up into the pot, which runs over the sides of the pot into the reservoir, then gets cycled back up by the pump.
You can do this project with an underground reservoir (click this link) or with two pots stacked inside each other (click this link). A fountain made using two pots can be placed on patios or moved around the garden. One made over a reservoir lets you use a wider variety of pot styles and you can even place more than one fountain over the same reservoir.
DIY Waterfall
When we think of backyard waterfalls, we usually think of ones that fall into a pond. But you can also build pondless waterfalls, which have a concealed reservoir like the fountains we talked about above. With either type of waterfall project, you can save money by using local stone to construct the waterfall. You might even have some already on-hand.
Whichever style you go with, you’ll be doing some digging. Here’s where you might think of hiring a contractor with experience putting in ponds or underground water reservoirs. But if you want to do it all yourself, there are plenty of tutorials online about digging ponds and building waterfalls (click here to check one out).
While we don’t carry pond supplies at Richardson Saw, you can pick up some of the tools you’ll need to build your water feature and maintain the area around it. Don’t want grass clippings in your waterfall? Head on over and get a bagging lawn mower. Need to clean up weeds around your fountain? We carry string-line trimmers to cut weeds down and hand-held sprayers for applying herbicide. Digging your own reservoir? Pick up a top-quality shovel by Corona.
