Looking for native shiners

[Al Agnew]

On 6/23/2023 at 9:01 AM, MOFishwater said:

Sounds awesome Al! Do you have any pics or videos of the former setup you had? I've been really wanting to put in a pondless waterfall/bubbler for the birds but it seems overwhelming at the moment after scouring various websites and youtubes for too long. Might have to wait for the 'next house' like all of our other grand ideas and dreams. 

If any of you other folks have some pics of your setup I'd love to see them also. Its amazing how much of a wildlife attraction a small water feature can be. 

I can't find any good photos of the whole thing, but I can tell you how I built it.  I was fortunate enough to have a gently sloping yard, sloping downwards toward the house, so excavation of a natural-looking "stream" was easy.  I drew it out on paper...farthest upstream pool would be about 6 feet long by 3 feet wide by 8 inches or so deep, then a waterfall dropping into the next pool about 8 inches tall.  The next pool would be shorter, about 4 feet long, but deeper, 14 inches or so, gradually rising to a steep riffle about 3 feet long into the next pool, which would curve to the right, and be about 10 feet long by 4 feet wide by 12 inches deep.  There would be a gentle riffle about 5 feet long into the next pool, which would curve to the left, be about 8 feet long by 3 feet wide by 8 inches deep, and then a low waterfall into the final pool, which was 12 feet long by 5 feet wide by 20 inches deep.  The bottom of that pool was about 30 inches below original ground level.  I excavated the general shape of the pools and their depth, then collected a lot of rocks of various sizes and shapes off our land and piled them up.  Had my nephew who was just starting a landscaping business bring over a bobcat and bring some rocks too big to move by hand...I had some rocks that were up to 4 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet.  I planned out where I would use the bigger rocks, making vertical "bluffs" on the outside of the bends, and planning to use flat rocks to have the water pouring over for the waterfalls.  I carefully dug out the edges of the channel so that the various rocks would fit.  Then, I took the rocks back out and lined the whole thing with rubber roofing material.  Placed all the rocks back into their locations atop the roofing material.  Now I had the basic configuration finished. 

I glued flaps of the roofing material onto the main bottom material where the waterfall rocks were, and glued the other edge of the flaps to the edge of the rocks, so that the water couldn't seep underneath the waterfall slabs but had to run over them.  I dug a trench from the end of the bottom pool to the upper end of the top pool for the water line that would circulate the water from the pump at the bottom to the beginning of the stream, and laid the piping.  Now I was ready for the final landscaping.  I backfilled dirt and gravel around the rocks along the edges.  In places I'd kept the banks gently sloping and covered with the roofing material well away from where the water itself would be, and these areas I covered in creek gravel so it would look like little gravel bars.  I started out covering the bottoms of the pools with gravel as well, along with scattered larger rocks.  I found out fairly quickly that this wasn't a good idea; it made cleaning the pool bottoms periodically impossible, so I ended up draining it and digging the gravel all back out; the bottom of all the pools ended up being just the roofing material with the scattered larger rocks, and the bottom of the big pool at the lower end was nothing but flat roofing material, because it collected all the sludge and leaves eventually and really needed cleaning out the most often.  The riffles were partially exposed roofing material which was black in color, and partly covered in rocks; algae soon covered the roofing material and you couldn't easily tell what it was; it looked like slick bedrock, which was a pleasant surprise.

I planted some aquatic and semi-aquatic plants I got from a local water garden store in buried pots along the edges.  One plant, that had a strong and pleasant minty smell, took off and grew everywhere.  The others were well-behaved.  I also brought some semi-aquatic grass back from a trip to Minnesota.  It spilled out of the pot I had it in and tried to take over.  And then I planted a couple sprigs of water willow, and it was a relentless spreader...you DON'T want to plant water willow!

In the 20 plus years I had the water garden, I went through 3 pumps and was on my 4th one when we left.  I tried several different ways of enclosing the pump so that it wouldn't continually get clogged with debris--one time a pump went out because a big water snake got sucked into it and gummed up the works!  Never did find an ideal solution to that; just figured on spending another couple hundred dollars on a new pump every 6 years or so.