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Moulds or liner?
Justin Doherty2
Posts: 205
As well as having renewed the school wildlife pond, I'm going to be building a wildlife pond at my own place from scratch. So which would people recommend; liner or mould?
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Liner, then you can have the pond exactly the size and shape you want and your planting shelves to suit you. It's also less of a problem to get level, you can add or take away some soil from under the edges to make it right. and you don't have to worry about whether you've got it all supported or not. It moulds to the shape you've dug
In the sticks near Peterborough
We've found using a liner to be far and away the best solution - we've been able to incorporate a sloping area to enable wildlife to enter and leave the water safely. Hedgehogs drink from the pond and can get out of the water easily; birds use the shallow area for bathing.
We've also been able to make the pond the size and shape we wanted. We found this site very helpful http://www.wildaboutgardens.org.uk/thingstodo/inaweekend/put-in-a-pond.aspx.
Rather than edge the pond with rocks we laid turf over the edges and down to the water level. This has resulted in a very natural looking pond.
Remember that having lots of marginal plants will make the pond look smaller; we are glad that we made the pond a bit bigger than we originally planned.
As I think you know, we made this pond earlier this spring.
Raindrops in the pond.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Does there need to be anything under the liner? Is liner expensive?
We bought our liner from http://www.pondkeeper.co.uk/flexiliner.asp and the underlay was half price. We got the liner that is guaranteed for 40 years.
As long as the soil isn't too stony a layer of sand or soft soil then the underlay is all you need.
Pondkeeper are really helpful and there's a calculator to help you work out how large the liner needs to be.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
I got mine from pondkeeper too and I bought the cheapest kind (15yrs?) for pond and bog garden.