jclimber, I've have a setup very similar to what you are talking about though my pond is only half the size, still large for an ornamental pond with goldfish. I have a Savio Skimmer with two pumps, one goes to a rapids effect at a small, small stream that feeds in under the biofilter fall, and, the other one pumps into the biofilter. I also have an upper pool and a lower pool separated by a wide but short water fall. The Savio Skimmer (full size) is located at the other end of the lower pool from the waterfall. My two magdrive pumps work fine. Laguna brand 3900 waterfall pumps. That all said, I would take ccoombs advice, no doubt. The number one problem with my pond is keeping the detritus and other junk off the bottom. In fact, you never can keep it off the bottom. The detritus is so fine that you only stir-it up if you get in to clean the pond. So my advice would be to go with the bottom drain setup but still use a skimmer box for the top floating stuff. Thanks for the btm drn link, ccoombs; I hadn't seen that... and thanks for the explanation of the bottom drain (not for draining, necessarily) because when I first heard about BDs that what I thought for sometime! I like the suggestions for saving money. If you can afford the time, better to make your own... esp. underlayment; I actually think old carpet (go dumpster diving at a carpet store) is superior to the underlayments I've laid hands on. Here's another suggestion: I'd get the rock out. It would be one thing if they were in the water atop the liner, but rolling liner up over them is just taking up space. Plus, you could use those big ones to help landscape at the edge. So it occurred to me when you talked about getting an electrician to bring a circuit out to the pond that this electrician is going to have to pay someone to trench. Most places are under the National Electric Code and that means burying the cable 30" or more... they're going to want to use a trencher. If you're going to have to get a trencher in for that you could save by getting a mini-excavator (rental from any tool/equip rental shop) and have it equipped with multiple bucket sizes... most come with options. get a slender bucket for the trench work, wider bucket for the rock. If an excavator can't lift the rock it should be able to beat on it enough to crack it smaller and scoop it out... of course, you could just pay someone to remove the large rocks. Whatever you decide make sure you have 'em mark the area for underground utilities. I really like your setup though. You never did say if you planned to have fish, what kind? Is that a german sheppard!? He/She will love the pond!

This bird "Ole Blue" would change your mind if you saw him do what Hubby and I watched him do. We have a double stranded electric fence around the yard, you can see it in the pic. It makes a believer out of the dog and the horses when they touch it. Ole Blue stepped over the bottom strand and ducked under the top strand and didn't miss a beat getting to my pond. We watched him walk round and round the pond trying to figure out how to get to those beauties. I took a dozen pictures of him and we could walk within 10 ft of him before he would fly away. I had 90 lb test fishing line strung all around my pond and he still got my fish before I put up the net. I discovered his foot prints in the algae all around the shallow sides of my pond and realized he was flying into my pond and not flying into the yard and walking up to the pond. Thus the net. I also had a floating alligator at the time. This was the old pond before we re-built it. Glenda

McKool, If you upload to photobucket, go to your photo page, the one where you are looking at only one photo, as below. On the right, there is a heading "LINKS", and under it click in the little window labelled "HTML Code". After you click in the little text window, a little box should pop up that says "copied". (If the "copied" box doesn't pop up, just select all the text and copy it. There may be more than one little text box over there, but use the HTML one) Then paste this text into your post where you want the picture. It will be a very long string of text, that should look like this, with leading and trailing a's with pointy brackets and a couple of quote marks that I have removed so you can see the text: href=http://s1252.photobucket.com/albums/hh563/gilroybighouse/Pond/? action=view¤t=photo.jpg target="_blank">img src="http://i1252.photobucket.com/albums/hh563/gilroybighouse/Pond/photo.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" I have circled the little box in blue, below. Then preview your post - the picture should show up.

You might post on the Conifer forum and get some responses from people who are more knowledgeable about conifer varieties. It is an interesting request! Also, there is a new book out on conifers that is getting terrific reviews. The title is CONIFERS FOR GARDENS: AN ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA. The author is Bitner. It is 448 pages long. It is $37.77 (US) at Amazon. Best of luck to you!