Bubbling Rocks & Other Custom Water Features

Of all the different water features we install, a bubbling rock is probably one of the lowest maintenance. It creates sound in the garden, but anytime leaves fall into an open water pond, they get wet and they sink to the bottom. They make a mess.

Well, with a bubbling rock feature, it’s gravel filled to the surface. And as the water flows down through the gravel, it goes back into the pump and then comes back through the core drilled rock and splashes out the top. It’s very easy to clean and maintain.

You go out there and blow everything out of it with a leaf blower and it stays nice and clean. You put an algaecide in it once a week and it stays nice and clean for you.

They’re very versatile too. You can do a small one or really large ones. As small as two feet by two feet and as large as 20 feet by 20 feet, depending on the application that you’re looking for for your space. They’re really unique.

And a lot of times we ask people too, when we go out to do a quote, we go out and do free quotes for jobs. We’ll ask them to get a couple of pictures together that they like. Sometimes they’ve seen something somewhere and they’re like, oh, we’d really like to do this.

Well, sometimes the pictures aren’t real practical. There was a customer who came in a few years back. They had a whiskey barrel and a big, beautiful three foot fountain flowing out of a whiskey barrel. And I said, look, this isn’t gonna work. And I said, this is why. See all that water in that picture around that whiskey barrel, you’re gonna have to fill it up five times a day.

You wanna do something that’s going to be enjoyable, not create work for yourself. And because the fountain was so large, every time the wind blew, the water didn’t land back in the barrel. And so what we did for that person is we just switched the style of fountain head.

There’s another one called a water bell that sends out a very thick layer of water. It looks like an upside down mushroom. That one’s not as affected by the wind near as badly. And so we were able to get them what they wanted, but tweak it a little bit. So we know the maintenance for them is gonna be achievable.

I wanna tell people this too, is that, you’re outdoors when the weather gets nicer, when you invest a little bit of time and money, of course, but to do something nice for your weather, you know, it’s the sound of water, maybe it’s some wind chimes or something. We do a lot of fire pits.

I’ve got a pondless waterfall right beside my deck. So in the summertime, we have the windows open in the bedrooms and then you can hear that waterfall running. And it’s very low maintenance because there’s no open water.

So basically the water pumps up to the top of the falls, runs down the waterfalls into a basin and the basin’s got a couple vaults in it that hold water. And then you just cover the vaults with gravel. And then the pump sits down in the vault, pumps the water back up and around, so you see none of the working parts of it. It looks very natural and it’s very low maintenance.

What do we do in the winter? So in the winter time, like for a lot of the pondless features, the pump is one of the more expensive parts of doing the feature. And so we want to protect that pump. Here in Ohio, we can be extended cold like we saw this winter.

Some winters, you know, we’re cold and we’re warm. We’re cold and we’re warm. This year, if you were trying to run your fountain, it would freeze up and then not, the water would freeze on the top of the rock and not go back into the basin.

Well, once enough of that water freezes up top, there’s no water down where the pump is. And so the pump can burn out. So that’s one of the reasons we recommend sometime around Thanksgiving, maybe a little before we’ll go out on a lot of the ponds that we do full service.

The nursery will go out and do service for people. We’ll go out and pull those pumps and, you know, make sure they’re out of the pond and drain the water out of them for the winter time. And then just about anytime in the month of April here, we’re going to start firing everything back up.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).