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Well after much thought and lots of hard work, I decided to build a large outdoor pond for my turtle. This will be her second year being outside and she loves it. We have a fence around the pond, a 4ft high spaced wooden picket fence. There are large koi, goldfish, shubunkins, rosey reds, bull frogs and toads for her friends. Its heavily planted with dwarf cattails, water iris, bloody dock, parrots feather, water lettuce and 3 water lillies plants. The pond is 15ft long, 11ft wide and mostly 2ft deep with a 4ft hole by the water fall that is 3ft deep. I have a large bog planted bog that is the filter and it keeps the water crystal clear. The first few pictures are of the fence before I got the bog installed. I have a large skimmer box with a 3,600 gpg pump inside of it for the filter and waterfall and I have another 2,100 gph pump for the stream. There are 12 underwater lights in the pond that looks amazing at night.








This is the bog before I got all the plants in. It is 18"s deep and has a 1 1/2" PVC pipe running on the bottom with slits cut in the pipe facing down feeding water from the bottom. There is almost 3,000# of 3/8" pea gravel in the bog.

Beautiful pond! Great work. Wish I had a back yard.

Looks really good. Guess the turtle was a little camera shy.

Looks beautiful!

Yes, our turtle is camera shy. She is always cruising the bottom of the pond and coming up every now and then to munch on some water lettuce. She refuses to eat her turtle food because she would rather eat the pond plants. She has ate about half of the 50 rosey reds I put in there 2 months ago. The pond dig wasn't too bad to do since we were able to get started on it the second week in March since we really didn't have a winter last year. There was no snow and the frost was out of the ground. Took me a day to dig it deeper and wider. I had been working on it every chance I got til I was happy with it. It took about 4 1/2 hrs to fill with water. The natural plant filter bog took another day to make and get finished. I dumped in 45 60lbs bags of pea gravel in the bog. There was waay too much gravel to rinse out so I just let the filter do its job and 4 days after I put all the rock in the water was crystal clear. The fence was simple to make, but took forever staining it. Since it was so close to the pond, I didn't want to use a paint sprayer, so I brushed it on. Both sides and all the edges too. That took at least 2 weeks working on it when I could. I do nothing to the pond now except make sure the skimmer box is empty, make sure the water is topped off and the plants are out of the way to the skimmer box. We loose a little bit of water from evaporation from the splashing on the waterfall. Our turtle just loves it out there. I will see her early in the morning up on the drift wood basking. When I go down there to check on her she always comes over and says hi. Its so peaceful down there. Just last week the wife and I were out there enjoying the pond and a squirrle climbed over the fence less than 5ft away from us and got a long drink out of the waterfall.

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POND GURU!!! that's one of my goals is to build one in my grandmothers yard )) absolutely STUNNING!!!

so awesome. i still remember the frog, next to the pond, from last year.

A quick update. This fall when I was doing some work on the pond, I tore out my first filter since I had the bog now. Well a few days after that I was cleaning the leaves out of the pond and getting ready for winter. I noticed a large clump of leaves so I reached down to get them, when I was pulling the net up it seemed rather heavy. It was our Lime ear slider that when MIA last year. I wasn't sure where she went, but I figured that he went down to the creek behind our house to play. Well I think that he was hiding under my big filter that I tore out. Here are some pics. Look at all the new growth on the shell
I love his markings too






Ok fast forward a few months. The pond has a nice layer of ice on it, but there is still plenty of open water. I installed a much bigger pump, a 5100 gph high flow pump. I wanted to see how everyone was doing under the ice so I took a large chunk out last night.





That is right at almost 8"s thick. Still plenty of water left in the pond.

All the fish look healthy and swimming around


I was able to find the turtles tonight in the pond. They are still moving around, just super slow. I would be too if I was in that cold water, but they are native to my area so they must be used to it.

Wow, tough buggers! Hope they do well over the winter.

Got some pictures of the turtle todayin the pond. Still lots of ice on the pond, but this January thaw is great!!




The water temp is 39*F at the bottom of the pond. That just a bit over 3' deep.

He looks great... crystal clear water too.

The turtles did great over the winter. They came out of there winter sleep mode just fine and are swimming around and basking when the sun is out. We didn't loose any fish over the winter. I did some work on the filter a few weeks ago and ran a new water line from the pump to the bog filter. Wow what a difference that makes. The water is always crystal clear now, even after we had 3 inches of rain last week. The water was clear as can be and the overflow pipe did its job. The pond had nice water change from all the rain. Will be posting some pictures soon once I get my new pond lights installed.

Sounds great, thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to those pics!

Went out to the pond today and got some pics.

Most of the fish. You can kinda see in the center top of the picture one of the turtles.