The back retaining wall is almost complete and we have made tremendous progress this week on the underwater shelves that will be home for many rocks and plants in the future.

The idea behind the shelves is to add varying levels within the water for different varieties of plants that require different depths and give the fish areas to swim through and around, etc. The shelves were not difficult to carve out, just a lot of digging and sculpting of the earth.

The black tubs that you see behind the retaining wall are our “bogs.” These make up most of the filtration system for the pond. Water will flow into them, be filtered up through various sizes of rock and gravel, and then the top of then will be filled with water plants. The plants feed off the nutrients from the water and remove harmful nitrates from the water. The water garden is an entire ecosystem, as the fish benefit from the cleaner water and they in turn create waste that feeds the plants in the water garden and the bogs. More about this system as we put it all together. For this week, Scott was able to get them plumbed so that the pipes could be buried. The tubs will essentially be “underground” when we are finished building the hill behind the retaining wall. You will literally be able to walk up to the top rim of them.

We will be covering all this back side of the bogs with the dirt that we removed from the giant hole we dug for the water garden, in the beginning. This will essentially level out our yard, as you can somewhat tell from the above photo.

Finally, here is an overview video of the entire yard and our progress as of today.

We have done so much, already. Next we will be finishing the last bit of the large retaining wall and then installing one on the house end of the water garden, for stability. Progress will be slowing on this project for the next few weeks, as paying jobs require our attention, but we will still be doing as much as we can as the days pass.

If you are following along, or if you have questions, please post a comment. You can subscribe to our Youtube channel here to follow our diy and update progress videos.