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Fourteen years ago, Julie and Tommy Keck spent a year renovating their 1940's house.
Since then,
they've been outside.
One project, with the help of their three sons and a friend with a bobcat, was
building a pond under the shade of old oak trees.
This was just a natural drainage ditch. It was just kind of a gully. I think maybe
the owners, previous owners had started
to do a pool, at one time,
attempted to and they just kind of dug a hole and quit.
-I think we went to a home and garden show - Our home and garden show
And really liked the water features
and decided, well we have a hole started,
so let's just go with it.
Their design has come a long way since Tommy first shared his idea with Julie.
If we're not going to put a pool in,
I'd just rather, I'd like to have a natural pond you see out in the country.
And we put Bentonite in the bottom of it,
which is a natural clay. What they use out in the country to keep it from
to keep the water in, but we couldn't keep it high enough on the
sides and when it would rain,
it would wash the Bentonite down, and the pond
would only stay about so deep.
By then, Julie had her vision: A prettier pond that
wasn't muddy or covered in string algae.
She had also bought her first little coy, so
they drained the pond, moved the
native fist to a friend's stock tank,
and installed an underlay in
fifty by sixty foot wide.
We lined it with all these rocks,
and that was our first attempt at a real
coy pond with a liner in it.
But, back to the first day of digging,
Julie had another idea,
building a deck to sit and enjoy the pond.
When my friend had that bobcat here, she told him
cut that out, cut us out a ledge over there and see what that looks like.
And so we cut that, cut a ledge out here
and then we stood there and looked at that for a few days and
and said, let's pour some concrete there and
They don't like to hear when I say I have an idea. They're like:
Ohh Mom...
The three boys.
Oh Mom...
The natural slope lent itself to carving a ledge for multi tiered garden experience.
Then, they added rock hauling to their list of things to do.
We're on the road and I go, look at those rocks! Stop!
Kids we've got to get the rocks!
Those rocks came from when we first bought this place
Came from an old house at UTSA Boulevard and I-10
at a contractor that was knocking down.
And I asked him, what are you going to do with that rock?
He said it's going to get hauled off. He said, If you want it, you need to get it.
So I went over there with my boys and we
tore the rock off the house.
Loaded it into trailers and we brought every one of thsee rocks and stacked them.
Our boys were probably 6, 10, and 12
when we moved in here, and our oldest is 26 now.
And, he was also
a big football player at Texas Tech and he's the one that moves all the big rocks,
that's his job. All those rocks, those Colorado boulders
"Casey, come here!"
Julie and Tommy designed the waterfall to be enjoyed indoors as well.
More rocks and the the soil they dug for the pond form a dam,
designed with a pump to suck water into a bog of layers of rock that
filters the recirculating water back into the pond.
It will filter out all of the, a lot of the impurities in the water
and it will come out
then you have to clean that bog out about
once or twice a year.
This has gone through a big transition
of many years and a lot of work and a lot of redos, and then we
finally read the book.
They joined the water garden club of south Texas to learn from other ponders and finesse their system.
In my opinion, we have a good ecosystem going
and I don't like to mess with it. I don't like to add chemicals,
We don't add chemicals.
We don't do much. We clean our scim filters
We clean the bog twice a year. We might every now and then add a little bit
of live bacteria
to help break down -beneficial bacteria- beneicial bacteria to help break down
some of the debris
and some of the fish mug.
We just come feed the fish.
Every morning Julie comes out before work with Dotty, the family dog
the fish see her coming and race to the deck for breakfast.
It's a ritual that starts her busy day with the gentle moment.
Since she and Tommy each run their own business, after work they get together by
the pond to compare notes
and watch the sunset.
You don't feel like you're in the city.
We don't have, I mean as close as we are to the street,
except for that.