Okay, so your pond liner is in and your water has been successfully introduced….what next? As you can see from our own pond build there is a little bit of work to do to make everything look tidy. Time was spent considering how best to trim and edge the pond liners –here we show you how we got on.
After we had put our pond liner in and filled the pond with water we had a considerable amount of landscaping still to do. By choosing a pond liner over a metre each way bigger than what we needed we now had a considerable amount of pond liner to trim to size.
But, as ever with this pond build project, the trick is to not rush in but to think of eventualities. In our case we knew that we intended to cover the ground around the pond with slate chippings and also install a waterfall and beach area. Once the pond liner is cut it can never be a whole piece again (without joining). A bit of thought at this stage proved useful later.
I must admit that with so much overlap it was hard to see where the pond started or ended! What is interesting to note is that the pond liner can still be lifted at its edges at this stage - pond embankments can be lifted or lowered to create a perfect shape.
I decided to trim the pond liner allowing approximately half a metre of overlap around most of the perimeter. In the area where I wanted to locate the beach and waterfall I left as much pond liner overlap as possible in case it was needed later.
Pond liner is easy to cut by using sharp scissors. Try to take your time to avoid injury and unknowingly cutting too far into the liner.
Here at pondkeeper we have many products to make the pond liner edge look more natural. Inevitably, your volume of pond water will change depending on the recent climate - sometimes this can mean that the area of transition (where the pond meets the rest of the garden) can expose the unsubmerged liner. This not only looks un-natural and slightly unsightly but leaves the pond liner exposed to degrading UV light.
Fortunately there are some great products on the market now to make your pond edge look good. We chose to use a stone faced pond liner. This is a 0.5mm thick PVC pond liner which has attractive golden stone gravel glued to it on one side. This liner isn't designed to be watertight itself but to be used as a secondary product on top of pond liner to make it look better. We wanted to cover the whole edge of our pond with this material so needed to know what length we would need. We calculated the pond perimeter using the standard formula for finding the perimeter value of a circle(as pie (3.14) multiplied by the radius squared). Our pond was 3.2m wide so the radius was 1.6m. using this formula we get 8.03m. It is longer than it is wider so we increased this to 10m to be sure.
Stone pond liner is available in various sizes. 0.4m wide is the shortest width and least expensive. This size proved ample for our edging purposes. The pond liner is supplied on rolls and can be supplied up to 25m long (82'). Other sizes avilable are 0.6m, 1.0m and 1.2m with max lengths of 20, 12, and 12m respectively.
The strip of stone lining is long and thin so to edge it around a curved shape isn't straightforward. We took the approach to make a cut (approx 15cm, 6") every metre or so (3' 3") into the end of the liner due to be held under the water. This allowed a curved shape to be formed.
We were really pleased with the final result. It does still look a bit 'false' here but over time once the whole garden is landscaped we expect it to blend in better. So pleased were we with the look that we decided next to create a pond beach area with stone pond liner.