Tuesday, July 24, 2007

The Big Dig




It is sometimes funny how we arrive at an idea. Last year Walter from Sugar Mountain Farm had a post with a picture of one of his boys in a pool of green water with a frog on his head. The thrust of the post was that they had a small swimming pool that they allowed to go wild instead of treating it with conventional pool chemicals. That played into our long held desire to have somewhere on the farm that we could swim. Unfortunately, we do not have a suitable spring anywhere on the farm that would allow us to build a pond that wouldn't get stagnant in the summer. After a little time noodling around on the internet we came across a couple of sites related to "natural swimming pools". These pools, which seem to be fairly popular in Europe basically consist of a body of water held in place by a pond liner. Instead of pool chemicals the water is cleaned by cycling it through a biofilter which consists of a plant zone filled with wetland plants that grow in the shallow perimeter of the pool/pond. There is a submerged wall inside of that plant zone which creates the swim area and keeps the plants as well as the rocks and gravel they grow in where they belong.

A little further along our research trail we came across a downloadable book by a company called Total Habitat (www.totalhabitat.com) which is based in Kansas. The book is basically a step by step how to build a natural swimming pool. So anyway, we spent a lot of last winter planning out our pool and figuring out where we wanted it. Over the 4th of July we rented an excavator and roughed out the hole for the pool. We have been woking on refining the shape since then. We are now ready to install the underlayment for the liner (old carpets) and to order the liner, pump, etc.

4 Comments:

Blogger meanders said...

This looks cool--literally and figuratively! I'll be curious to hear more about it, I remember reading an article about these natural swimming pools in a gardening magazine last year (either Horticulture or Fine Gardening), but the article only described what they are, didn't tell much about how to go about it.

7/24/2007 10:30:00 PM  
Blogger jojo said...

ok you be the guinea pig. I want one too! cept i have a feeling if i dug a pond that big, gators would come.

7/27/2007 08:19:00 AM  
Blogger Walter Jeffries said...

Congrats Peter on the pool! Stay cool...

9/02/2007 12:03:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for this article on yours pool...See I too want a guinea pig..but problem is where to create environment suits his naturality....any idea?

9/29/2007 03:03:00 AM  

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