From pool to beds

Our pool is ancient and needs thirty million things to keep running, like your normal algaecides and other pricey chemicals but also desperately expensive new liner. And we never use it. We're thinking about filling it with tree trunks and compost materials for permanent asparagus-dominant permacultured beds.

So how should we break up the existing concrete bowl of the pool?

better yet would be to run it as a natural pond, and plant edible water plants in it, plus fish.

Abe Connally wrote:better yet would be to run it as a natural pond, and plant edible water plants in it, plus fish.

That would be better, except that would necessitate thousands of dollars reworking the liner, which is disintegrating. So, yeah: call me a cheap, cheap bastard, but... asparagus bed.

I thought you mentioned a concrete base?

thousands of dollars for a liner? How big is this thing? I just got a 25 ft by 25 ft EDPM fish safe liner for under $500, shipped. It has a 25 year warranty, lifetime if you use an underlayer. I figure I can raise around $350-$400 worth of fish a year in the thing, and a lot of value in water crops (watercress, taro, etc). So, it pays for itself pretty fast.

How deep is it? Maybe you don't need to break up the concrete, as it will help hold moisture for your bed.

www.gardenpool.org

Turn it into a walapini aquaponic greenhouse.

Abe Connally wrote:I thought you mentioned a concrete base?

thousands of dollars for a liner? How big is this thing? I just got a 25 ft by 25 ft EDPM fish safe liner for under $500, shipped. It has a 25 year warranty, lifetime if you use an underlayer. I figure I can raise around $350-$400 worth of fish a year in the thing, and a lot of value in water crops (watercress, taro, etc). So, it pays for itself pretty fast.

How deep is it? Maybe you don't need to break up the concrete, as it will help hold moisture for your bed.

R Scott wrote:www.gardenpool.org

Turn it into a walapini aquaponic greenhouse.

gardenpool.org is pretty cool! I was riveted the first time I saw it, but we have so much humidity here (90% yesterday, 93% today, ground is always wet everywhere in the mornings due to adiabatic lifting) that a setup like that would create instant Powdery Mildew and, quickly following, blight. *sad sigh* Which is another reason to make sure we have adequate drainage. Abe, fish are an enormous amount of trouble around here, we have no coyotes so are inundated with mesopredators, opossums and raccoons and everything else that thinks that our food is tasty and uses the creek in the backyard as a highway. We lose about 10 housepets a year to racoons and other "nighttime predators".

There are also few examples of pool mods that divide the existing pool into a smaller pool and green space, I've tied to do a lot of research. But it's not what we want to do. I'll think about it though.

Organic asparagus sells for $6 a pound around here. That's why I'm thinking Asparagus beds... best bang for the buck!