!: Building a Low-Maintenance Water Garden, Without the Pond- Introducing the Pond-Less Waterfall

For those of you who want to have a professional backyard pond but don't want to have to worry about maintaining a large body of water, a pond-less waterfall is the solution for you. Without the pond, you don't have to worry about algae control, water filtration, and keeping animals and young children away from your body of water. Instead, you can create the relaxing, and soothing sound of falling water, while leaving your neighbours baffled as to how water can literally fall from nowhere.

The trick behind building a pond-less waterfall lies in the pump vault. The pump vault is a construction which houses your pump, and helps to collect the water from the waterfall. Before embarking on this project, however, you will need an adequately sized liner. The duty of EPDM liner is to keep the water contained within your "pond", in order to prevent water loss. The liner must be sufficiently large to contain the entire pump vault, and to be laid out all the way from the pump vault to the top of the waterfall. Both the pump vault and the liner is usually obtained as part of a pondless waterfall kit (which would also include the pump and biological waterfall filter), such as the one offered by Algreen Products.

After a liner is obtained, a hole for the pump vault must be dug. A 5' x 5' x 2' hole should suffice for most pump vaults. Next, the waterfall must be built up by creating a mound of dirt and rocks. The top of the mound should have space for a biological waterfall filter, which would not only filter the water, but also release the water unto the top of the waterfall from its lip. Liner can now be lain out, starting from the pump vault hole, all the way up to the top of the waterfall, where the biological waterfall resides.

The final step of the installation procedure is to insert the pump into the pump value, connect the pump to the biological waterfall filter, and to close the lid on top of the pond vault. Now you can fill the area surrounding the pump vault with pebbles. With the addition of the pebbles, it will seem like the water from the waterfall is falling directly into the ground!