Pond In My Front Yard | Walkway Garden

One way to really improve your landscape design is by adding a small pond or water feature to your yard. In this video, I show you how I clean up my front porch and walkway pond, what I do with my aquatic water lily plant in terms of maintenance, and then we install a new waterfall for the pond.

https://www.poposoapsolar.com/

POPOSOAP Pond Waterfall with Pump Kit, 304 Stainless Steel Waterfall Spillway with 40W 660GPH Pump, Pond Spillway with 9.8FT Corrugated Tubing for Garden (12.2″)

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hey budget gardeners Vita Loka here join me today as we set up my front pond so let’s go i’m a little later than usual when it comes to setting up my pond but it’s better late than never we are at my front walkway and this front walkway is seeing a lot of change this year let me take you around and show you what I mean i’ll put a link to a video that I made recently that showed you where I removed three large roodendrin that were in front of the house they were too large for this space and instead we basically shopped my yard and we moved a couple of pennials into this area which I am absolutely loving we also cleaned up the walkway itself did some power washing and as we head this way you can see that I have a bay window and that’s my bay window flower bed and then right over there is my front porch and the front porch was not looking great and needed some power washing so the power washing did get done and after the power washing got completed we went ahead and we added some of my furniture back onto the porch let me bring you up there and I’ll show you so here is the front porch i am planning to add some more container pots in this area we’ll do that on a different day and when you come off of the front porch and you look down there is a little pond that we installed a number of years ago so we’re going to be working on the pond today there are a couple of things we’re going to tackle the number one thing is cleaning the pond itself removing the water removing any of the leaf litter that’s in there we’re also going to be installing a new waterfall that I got for my pond and then we’re finally going to end the project with cleaning up around the pond i really enjoy having a water feature especially a pond right here at my front porch it’s so nice to be able to relax after a long day of gardening and just sit here enjoy a beverage and just listen to the water of my pond my husband and I put the pond in about 10 years ago or so and we’ve really enjoyed it part of our normal pond maintenance is each fall we remove the pump and the waterfall one thing that we noticed though last year was that the hose was starting to crack and what that means is the water was just pumping out everywhere and it was emptying out my pond very quickly a company named Popo Soap reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to try out a new waterfall for them i was excited about that it was great timing and so I figured let’s start the video with me unboxing and taking everything out so let’s go ahead and pull this box out of the main box so the first thing I’m noticing is we have a couple of tubes of adhesive the next thing that we have here is the user manual for the waterfall and the manual includes how to install the waterfall box it also shows how to install it with the solar panel there’s cleaning and maintenance and then finally troubleshooting we have the hose here and then there’s also another box in here and I’m looking at the hose and it looks like it’s long enough for what I need so I’m just glancing in here and it looks like it’s the pump with all the fittings but let me take them out so this high-performance pump is a 40 W pump and it looks like it’s perfect for my size pond now if you have a pond or you want to have a pond installed at your house you can always check out their website because they have lots of different models for different sizes of ponds that you can install now let’s see what’s in this box here and then this here is the actual waterfall box now that we’ve done the unboxing let’s do the next step which is cleaning the pond and before we start I just want to show you I have a little eastern Phoebe she’s right up there on that stick she’s not happy with me she wants me to work as quickly as possible because she wants to sit back on her nest where she has her next clutch of eggs waiting i promise mama I’m going to work as fast as possible i’m sorry and right up there is her nest with her little eggs waiting for her i’ll be using a submersible pump to pump out my pond i used to use a shop vac but I found that this works much better for me now that the pump has been placed inside of its bag and has been plugged in we’re now placing the pump into the pond now that the pump has been plugged in I just want to show you I’m having the water just pumped out right onto my lawn here it’s a great way to water my lawn I guess now that the water has been pumped out there are a few things to do next one is remove the water lilies there are two pots down there i’m going to clean them up and fertilize them and it’s a mucky mess down there the leaves need to be raked out and we’re just going to use a hand rake to rake those out after the leaves get removed we’re going to rinse it out and then use the wet dry vac and vacuum it out look how much cleaner it is after using the hand rake to take out all of the leaves and then pumping out all of the water I then used a large handled brush and just scrub the sides of it after that between a water hose and the shopv I then used my shop vac to pump out the water and got it to look like this the next step is installing the waterfall that involves removing some of the rocks and then following the directions to install the waterfall and the pump here are the instructions to install the waterfall so you can see the pump at the bottom of the pond and it has a netting around it just to keep the leaves out from going around the pump when it comes to the hose we’re going to leave it as is and if we need to next year we can always come in and cut it to size when you go to garden centers waterlies are very very expensive i want to say one water lily is like 20 or even $25 so these waterlies I’ve had for a number of years now and I’ve been able to divide them they overwinter just fine inside of my pond so they don’t require a whole lot of maintenance so what I’m doing right now is I’m just removing all of the leaves from last year the next thing I want to do is come in and remove the the water lily leaves themselves some of them look fine like this one looks okay but I want to remove any of le the leaves from last year if I can find some that just don’t look so good so I’m just taking a look at them to see if there’s anything that needs to be removed normally if I do this job in the early spring months it’s very obvious so like this leaf right here looks okay but this one here doesn’t look so good so I’m going to go ahead and just follow it down and cut it back and this is normal maintenance that has to be done during the season because even though this leaf looks okay right now what will happen is eventually the leaf will start to look more like this it won’t look as good so as leaves start to not look as good I do need to pull the water plant out and I just need to cut back any blossoms that have gone by or any leaves that have gone by i like to do that about once a month if I can and really it doesn’t hurt if I by mistake remove a leaf that looks that is okay like let’s say if I remove this leaf the plant will be fine there’s enough leaves on there but I’m gonna leave some of the leaves that look fine i’m just going through them and looking at ones that don’t look as good like this one here doesn’t look as good it’s even if I removed all of the dirt you can just tell it’s not as nice not as vibrant so I’m going to follow it down i’m going to cut it back another good indicator of the leaves that I would call the newer fresher leaves is see the back they’re a red color right and some of the leaves that I just removed they are not as red they are more of a tan color so that’s something else you can look for if you’re trying to figure out which leaves to cut back and which ones to keep the next thing I want to show you is look at the bottom of the pot the roots are coming right out and I can just tell by even looking at the top here that a bunch of the roots are coming out even from here so as much as I don’t love this job it is part of pond maintenance if you’re going to have a pond and you’re going to have aquatic plants like water lilies in it I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to remove the plants that are in here and I’ll show you what the next step is so at the very bottom you can see I had put some sort of a trash bag and that was just to keep it so that the soil didn’t come out of the bottom of the pot where the holes are and I cannot remember when was the last time I did this job it might have been two years ago or three years ago so we’re just going to see what we have and if it really even needs to be divided i want you to see there’s little stones or pebbles in here and the reason I do that is just to keep it again so that the soil doesn’t come out from the top of the plant but I think it’s good for me to take this out and at least just show you the structure of the water lily just so you’re familiar with it even if I’m making a little bit of a mess so sometimes it will happen where an old piece will come off just like that so we’re going to discard it and it very well could be that we don’t need to divide it which is great i’ve done it before and it’s not that hard to do but if we don’t have to do it today that’s even better just untangling it here and what I’m going to do next is I’m going to rinse this off because I just want to show you just so you’re familiar with what the structure of the water lily looks like here i’m not an expert when it comes to waterlies i’m just a home gardener that has had waterlies over winter for me year after year and I just do some basic maintenance work when it comes to my waterlies i just want to show you the basic structure here we have a plant right there because you can see that the roots are coming down and then new growth is coming up that way we have roots coming down over here with new growth we could come in with something like pruners or even a handsaw and we could cut right there if we wanted to divide this this is not a very big piece i feel comfortable repotting it the way it is so to repot we’re just going to use the same pot that we had we really don’t need a much larger pot but I’m happy to repot it because the roots were coming out from the bottom of it and from the top so what we’re going to do is just add a bag back in we’ll add a new bag and it’s just a shopping bag again it’s so that the soil does not come out from the bottom of it i have regular potting mix here we’re going to go ahead and add that in there if I felt that the liies were too large for this pot I would either get a larger pot or I could go ahead and divide them down i’m just going to push down and I’m filling it about halfway when I place this in the pot I just want to make sure that the roots are down below and that the leaves themselves are above i’m g to make sure that we’re pushing the roots in every year I like to do this i like to pull the lily out of the pot observe it pull out any pieces that may have they’re they rotted or they they just don’t look good just like that piece that fell off and then I see if the plant really truly needs to be divided and if not I just like to replace the bag and put the plant back in the pot i can go ahead and back fill i’m just pushing down the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to top dress this whole thing with the little stones or the little pebbles that I have you can use whatever you want this is just something I had in a fish tank that when I used to have fish indoors so we’re going to go ahead and use that these are very small size and that’s totally fine if you wanted to use much larger stones you could do that as well you could use something a little more decorative i’m okay just using these black colored ones but there are other prettier ones out there if you wanted to do that just moving them around and pressing down for fertilizer I like to use pawn tabs it’s aquatic plant food you want to use one tablet per gallon of soil and you want to do this each month during the growing season you want to push the tablet one finger deep into the soil 3 in from the crown of the plant press the soil around the inserted tablet to prevent fertilizer from being released into the water i have one more pond lily to tackle i’m going to do the same exact process i ended up just putting some of the old stone that was there mixed it in with the new stone and then I just came in with my water and I rinsed everything off that way well this is not something I normally say but let me get into my pond here and I’m going to place the lilies down in the bottom here i’m going to space them out i have one over on this side i’ll have one on this side there are so many aquatic plants that you can put inside of your pond i normally just stick to pond lilies this year I might experiment and I might put some other pond plants in here i’ve done it in previous years so you’ll have to stay tuned for that in another video now it’s time to plug in the pump and see how it comes out of the waterfall and whenever I plug in the pond for the first time of the season I always like to sit back and just watch it for a little while and if I need to make adjustments I can always make adjustments and it’s not just the first day it’s over a period of days and the other thing that’s going on right now is that I have the water running so that it’s filling up the pond so once the pond is almost full to the top I like to then turn it off i don’t want it to overrun and and go over the top there and then the final thing to do is just do some basic weeding around the pond there is something so peaceful about having a water feature in your yard it doesn’t have to be a pond it could be a little bird bath or it can be some sort of a tiny little fountain just having water in your yard is nice because it brings in things like the birds or frogs or toads or anything like that and I just like listening to the splashing water while I’m out here working in my yard as well when it comes to what’s around this pond it’s primarily mini hosta and when I do a garden tour I’ll bring you in for a closer look so you can see what the mini hosta look like but that’s the main plant that’s in here and other than that there are some loopin seedlings that I still need to remove and plus some other perennial seedlings that I need to remove but overall I would say that this area is in pretty good shape once I’ve finished weeding around here I’ll put down a nice fresh layer of mulch and other than that I would say this project is complete be on the lookout for a future video where we put together some beautiful pots and containers to put around the pond i really hope you enjoyed this video i hope it gave you some motivation or inspiration for your own garden if you have any questions or comments please drop them down below and until the next video make it a great day with gardening and now that this project is complete I can let mama bird rest sorry mama i hope you enjoy the pond [Applause]