The only help I had was a wheel-barrow....I moved 8 tons uphill in 8 hours over 4 days....I already had about 1 ton at the water level.....today I can see the bottom of the pond very well....the filter is starting to work good..the pond had water added to it on August 15....I have lava rock..bed sheeting...cut up water hose in the 55 gallon drum underneath the water fall rock...I have a 630 gallon per hour pump working it....

Hi all! Just a little warning about collecting rocks on your own from piles...Don't make the mistake I made. I noticed a nice pile of stone in a field, asked if the owner if he would be willing to part with some. He was a nice older fellow, said the stones had been there for a few years and he wasn't going to be using them or working the land anylonger, so take what ever I wanted. Well I took a walk out to the pile and lifted one, yep one rock. Stirred up a nest of yellow jacket wasps! Luckily I moved quick enough and only got whacked by one. So if you're not sure how long the pile has been there, be aware of what is buzzing around the pile. I must have been by the back end of the nest entrance or I probably would have seen or heard the wasps coming and going. Lucky me. I told the owner about the wasps so he wouldn't go near them. He told me to come back in the winter if I wanted the stone and thanked me for the warning. Well, I did go back and collected a few really nice stone for a wall that was going in. the nest was huge! the rock were on top of an old tree trunk which the yellow jackets were nesting in.

I have large flat flagstones on the upper part of my large pond, which has a shelf about three feet wide and the water is from six inches to twelve inches deep over this area. It does become covered with silt and algae, which I clean off with a deck brush every so often in the early part of the season and use a sharp spray head on the garden hose to blast out the gunk that gathers in between the stones. I net out the algae and larger bits of debris. The smaller particles and silt goes out through the pond's bottom drain into the sump. Over time the plants cover over most of the surface of the flagstone, so this keep the area algae free and clean. I like to see the flagstone clean so I don't mind the extra work of keeping it that way. If you do not clean it you may as well not bother having flagstone there, as it will be covered with algae and pond gunk, just like the liner is after a short period of time. As far as having river rocks on the bottom or even covering the shelves, personally I would stay away from that, as they would be difficult to keep clean and even more difficult to get the gunk out from between or under them. "Horton"

The place off of Harris Blvd near 77 might work. I live in Cornelius, so that's a reasonable drive. Thanks for the suggestions. No, I don't have any pics to post yet, though I've taken pictures as I've gone along. They're on various roles of film, so at some point I'll get them scanned and put on to my computer. I'll make it one of my summer projects. The pond is coming along nicely though. Instead of rocks around the border I've put strips of sod that actually dip into the pond a little bit. It makes it appear much more natural. The rocks are needed for the stream and waterfall that I will have coming from my smaller, original pond. I'm hoping to wrap it up this weekend, but we all know how projects seem to last a lot longer than originally anticipated ;-)