Create Your Own Lake – JCB Diggers Toys For Boys.

If you have the space in your garden, a spare half acre or so you should consider building your own lake, its a great boys project with all the machinery such as JBC diggers etc and all the macho earth-moving involved in building a lake, its just not a girly kind of a project, ( if girls start building lakes then whats next they might even start eating Yorkie bars !! )
So how to start your lake project – a plan is a good start, but its going to be a rough basic plan because as you will soon find out with lakes, the design changes once you start. Your rough plan should layout the shape and the different depths and levels in the lake, ideally there should be sloping beach areas and deep areas over 2 metres deep. As a general rule some deep areas help to even out the water temperature and help avoid algae problems, if the lake is to shallow you will find out that the water heats up quickly in the summer causing algae blooms. With the rough plan you can work out the volume of soil and sub soil that’s going to be removed, this is key because you are going to have to figure out were all this material is going to go. Ideally all the soil removed to form the lake can be used on site to form mounds and hills as part of an overall ground modelling scheme. Remember soil even good soil is expensive to get hauled away from your site by lorry, so look for other solutions. As a general rule a compacted fresh dug cubic metre of soil weighs a tonne and when dug expands 2 to 3 times so you end up with 2 to 3 cubic metres when dug
Now for the fun bit – toys for boys, in this case its a JCB digger or similar, wheeled or a tracked machine, they can be hired with or  without a driver or purchased if you have enough spare cash. Buying your own digger for a large project is not a bad option as the machine will have a resale value and it will allow you additional time to play around with the shape of your lake. For some ideas on JCB that are available try Scot JCB  If you have never driven a digger before then you need to practice in the middle of a large field with no over head wires, its all about the spacial awareness of the digger and your surroundings, if you have problem reversing you car out of a drive or parking a car then operating the digger is not for you get a driver either with a hired machine or find a good driver locally.
If you need to find a good driver the way to tell if they can do what they say is to get them to dig a square hole with a digger, not as easy as it sounds.
With the lake dug out the next consideration is a liner unless you are lucky and the area is spring feed. Traditionally a lake was lined with pubbled clay to create a lining that sealed the lake to hold the water, but these days pubbling clay is not to easy to find so your best bet is a butyl liner with a protective cover underneath and one over the top, finished with a covering of soil. The soil covering is important because it helps give the lake a natural look and helps the water to balance with regards to achieving a clear natural state.
This is just a quick overview of building your own lake, if you have a project in mind drop our advisor team a line and we will be sure to give you some advice to point you in the right direction.