Best Ever Recreation Pond and Waterfall: Greg Wittstock, The Pond Guy

all right it is a beautiful morning out here in that mitten miss Kim Yuna New York I don't care where I am as long as I get to see beautiful pods Allen Decker Decker spawn escapes and this is a water feature that you as it upon her promise its upon this is our first stop of the day and we're checking out a beautiful 11 by 18 foot pond that the owner's son said it was the best investment his father ever made I love to hear that oh yeah look at that with the Sun hitting it you did the pond someone else landscaped it yep somebody else landscape that we put the patio the patio is beautiful like now it looks like a little secret garden back there yeah the homeowners got some hits this custom furniture made like that around X tiles how that is really nice Wow [Music] I love the double waterfalls you over filtered a wetland and up my goodness gorgeous I love this little wood it's setting back here the perfect spot and then look at this right here so right off of their house and come right back here and you see this that's yeah well what a relaxing area fantastic so everything's pretty interactive here so we got it so you can kind of get stepping-stones through the patio up through the big slab so vent out that rock way probably 1,500 pounds at least yeah right here we got out we actually have a 6,000 mile falls tucked right in up here this is the way a filter supposed to look that's how you hide a bio falls and I love that you have the automatic dosing system going right into the bio Falls this is the ledge of the bio Falls but look at that it's different sized stones you got a natural piece of wood in here you've got some moss up on the front you can't see anything you got some sedum that just got planted on Dec 15 Jenny just got planted up here so that's gonna grow how long this was the last early summer yes last year this is one year old so the plants are just starting to get established it's just it's just absolutely that's the up flow filter and look at what it does for the water quality quality Zinta's because you've not just got a bio force you got a wetland up here to double filtration well that's why you get such great water quality here it's just so pristine perfect little place for a beaver and these are the little accents that people add that personalized their water feature I love seeing that stuff [Music] this is how you know a customer's enjoying their water feature good for him so what did you get one gender plus on this project pork is it was right about 50,000 this this whole backyard it was about a $50,000 water feature pond 16 tons of stone patio the whole thing and so maybe how many total man hours well I would save the almost 200 dish I hundred dollars so this is about 200 man-hours fifty thousand dollars and it created an environment that is his favorite place in as yard the best investment he ever made according to his son not a bad investment basically a car yeah he's got a car in his backyard except for this one breakdown reciate it's gonna be a nice thing about a water feature is every single year it matures with agent gets nicer and nicer as the plants grow as the ecosystem gets more established so a $50,000 investment like this today we'll look even that much nicer next year and the year after that year after that every other investment in the house redo your bathroom redo your kitchen it's going to depreciate put in a water feature and it will appreciate and it's this is considered landscaping and landscaping is the highest return on your dog you could possibly do because it matures with age beautiful absolutely beautiful Allan there's a landscape designer that drew the whole plan up drew a plan up after we had put the water feature in with the intentions that eventually there would be some type of a sitting area up here so then you could kind of look down throughout it as it kind of evolved we ended up putting that patio on that side yeah so they could kind of look up it all the sound goes that way that's that's where the peacefulness is that's where all those negative ions get released so how does this wetland filter work so basically this is just an up flow system so we have the aqua blocks in the bottom with a snorkel a centipede with about probably about 16 inches of gravel top of it everything is pushing all up through the rock and gravels washing it spilling back over and it creates a nice gentle flow and the purpose of this also was to slow the water down a little bit so we didn't have a rush in it kind of you could see how the water actually drops over to rocks rather than just a rapid every fall is different there's a different sound in each one which is awesome because it's how you tweak the flow of the water to you know the accoutrement of all the different waterfalls flowing together just completely and utterly changes that that that living space with that sound yeah this is great too because as this thing matures of the moss is starting to grow a little bit more that we put on there so it's gonna look really cool another years oh so it's the last 10 percent that make a job when you look at this I mean there's got to be one inch exactly you had this thing perfectly nailed with a laser transit don't mess around with 15 1800 pound rock but that water is flowing there's about an inch gap between there and it looks awesome flowing through there every one every stop has something unique and something different I love all of the little decorations that this guy had and you know just to see that cigar staff sitting there next to his tables custom-made furniture down there it just shows how he's living the aquascape life [Music] all right we're out here in New York with Alan Decker this is so fun I'm enjoying this day immensely so this is really cool because this is an existing Lake and then you built a recreation pond on top of it right right yep oh yeah 150 feet away how long would you put this in four years ago oh really okay great what's awesome is here I am come pull up to this job this is the first thing I notice and then I just turned the corner and I see this right here why would somebody with a living on a lake like this want their own recreation pond what why Alan why would you say because the water quality in that pond there's a lot of Beaver and everything else in there and it's just not healthy so we built this right on so they could swim in look at this look at this waterfall you just turned the corner oh look at that slope I am so jealous [Music] [Applause] [Music] that is absolutely spectacular buddy just terrific work this is so so incredible till four years old alright so why do they have kids they have a girl that I think she's about 13 14 years old now and they wanted somewhere as a swim and the woman likes to do laps so she wanted to have an open area that she could swim back and forth so it's about 65 feet in length 35 feet wide we've got a shallow area over here right now they're the the reason that it's it's a little tinted is because they go away for the whole month till they put a dye in and they put a little black dye in it because we didn't want to have they weren't going to be here to do the bacteria and stuff it is a pool pond it's about seven feet deep nice I love this patio over here that you put in - we put that in so you know everything's close to the water they can get in and get out and transition in the upper bank we actually got two systems here the upper part is a pondless and then we have like a little land bridge there and with water we jet it underneath it so it looks like it's all one coke oh okay so it's two separate systems [Music] so I love the fact that here's a homeowner that instead of putting in a swimming pool to do laps in they put in a recreation pond and the best thing about the recreation ponds and you can see this here is it's beautiful 365 days a year in the wintertime it gets ice on it you can you literally use it as an ice skating rink if you want to do and it's in wouldn't you rather look at this than a swimming pool that has one use a recreation pond you don't have to be in it to enjoy it you can be sitting alongside it watching the birds oh look at this another waterfall down so this is okay so explain how the wetland here works so basically I mean a lot of people call this different things I call it a reverse wetland because that way when the water is cascading down through there there's still a lot of oxygen in there it kind of falls right through the gravel and it's getting pulled through the rock and gravel down through the scent of the aqua blocks into the centipede module and we do have external pumps on this because it is a swim pond yep so generally there would be a little bit more water in here because they've been away for a month it'll waters just underneath the gravel which allows the plants the plants are still fine so you might have an inch or two of water in here when it's filled up all the way actually yeah and then everything the way we got it set up it all skims over here and to this side during a fall and it's very easily to be taken out of there with a net or a leaf rake that's pretty sore just look at how beautiful this is and you can see the waters clear even though they got a little bit of dying I mean I love the lily they're just and then there's where she swims her laps some small fish in here yeah they got some blue gills in there as well as goldfish so just some cute little fish so if you're swimming laps here you're looking at the floor you were looking at some small fish and it's so much more interesting when I go to a natural body of water I've constantly got a mask on and I'm you know the joke is whenever we go fishing I'm in the water looking at the fish chasing them around everybody's on the boat it's just so much more logical to me to have this in the yard I mean we're in what zone five six where zone five zone five New York that you can only really swim four months out of the year probably exactly but the beauty part about this is I mean you can open this up in April and we can run it till after Thanksgiving so even though you might not be swimming I mean if you got a wetsuit you if your heart but and then the winter you get ice skate absolutely and and and you can kind of see back there the water quality in that that is a it's nice to live on water but you would not want to swim in there here you'd want to swim in [Music] [Music] it just draws you across you just want to go across it beautiful so so talk to me a little bit about your style building waterfalls here well I mean this is all native rock for us so this is all granite boulders and stuff and you know I just like to I'd like to look at it as I would see in nature like water bouncing off of rocks and a lot of action so you get a little of that whitewater coming through there I love this so this is the pond this waterfall here gorgeous and then here's a land bridge system stops here yep we get water's coming on and this side trickling through yeah yep right obviously when you explain it you see how it works but nobody would unless you explained it they would not know they would not know and so they basically did that because they can run this one separate and keep this one at all year round Wow look at this waterfalls what's at Allen is a certified aquascape contractor and your team and you are artists of the year this is a labor of love hotter than 50 tons of boulders going up there this is just fantastic see there's another land bridge here so they can kind of transition to the back come across and then there's all water coming back down through here absolutely spectacular nice landscaping and just a beautiful setting my gosh they got their own vacation spot at home good job mr. Decker thank you love it [Music] [Music] I love my job getting to see these places and I wish more people knew that they could have something like this this it's not cheap but an inground swing pool isn't cheap either and an inground swimming pool has one use this has dozens of uses and it's way more relaxing than a swimming pool I love the fact that this lady swims laps in here that's my kind of that's my kind of woman right there someone that would actually get out there some people don't want to swim with the fish that's how we grew up man our bodies grew up not being acclimated to chlorine chlorine only been around for the last hundred years I actually think this is healthy people asked how these recreation ponds are to get in they're perfectly healthy this is the way ecosystems work bacteria is part of our bodies that we have bacteria in our body so it's organic it's natural no chemicals are used in this that natural body of water is not nearly as clean or as filtered as this one so this is called living the aquascape lifestyle right here it's as fun for me to see [Music] edging of a water feature is so important look at this how the grass comes right up next to the edge so many retention ponds its rip rock all the way around the edge look at how nice it does just look so naturally and there's look at this destination Boulder people are gonna come walking down here they're gonna want to walk right up to the edge and you know it's gonna be solid if alum voltage but boom dive right in here cuz it's the last 10% that make a job I mean this is just a really a big hole that's been excavated but how these rocks are positioned how the landscaping blends in you don't want to know where the water ends in the land against that little camp cantilever bluestone patio over there it's that last 10% that makes all the difference you wouldn't get inspired by this stuff like I do I know how you can't like comment hit the subscribe button so more people can find out what living the aquascape lifestyle is like I think that recreation ponds should be the standard and not the exception in swimming pools I love my job [Music]

Channel: Greg Wittstock, The Pond Guy

Views: 681,703

Rating: 4.8509116 out of 5

Keywords: recreation pond, swim pond, wetland pond, pond ecosystem, swimming pond, Aquascape, Greg Wittstock, The Pond Guy, New York pond, Ponds, Pond installation, vacation pond

Id: 6TkqMbNK5fY

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2018