DIY Garden Fountain

I am soooooo excited to share this project with you all. My dad and I made this diy garden fountain together for my birthday present a few years ago. Since we moved the following January, it has been sitting in a box. I found the box and re-assembled the fountain and thought that this would be exactly the type of project that YOU all would love as much as I do! So here it goes…this tutorial is a reassembly but you can get the idea!

Here is a step by step tutorial on how to create your own DIY Garden Infinite Fountain.

Items Needed:

Large Decorative or colored pot
smaller cheap plastic pot that will fit inside of the first pot when upside down
2 cheap plastic pot drip pans (as I like to call them)
small water pump
drill
small screws/nuts (1/4” by 1/2” long)
1/2” plastic tubing
1/2” plastic tubing tee

We started off with a large red plastic pot. (You want the pot to be made of something you can easily drill through.) We drilled a hole about 2 inches below the top of the pot, just below the inside lip. We simply drilled several holes next to one another, just large enough to fit the plug through from the water pump.

Next to assemble the inside of the fountain.

The cheap plastic pot used for the inside, will be flipped over inside the red pot. The pump will be inside of it. So to make sure water can get to the pump, we need to drill a bunch of holes in the cheap plastic pot (green pot) so that the water can easily get to the inside.

Next, turn the green pot upside down and stack your two plastic plant pot drip pans on top of one another, right side up. (disregard the tubes coming out at this point—I told you this was a reassembly!)

Next drill 2 holes through the plant drip pans AND through the bottom of the green pot with a drill bit the same size as your small screws/nuts. Mine was 1/4”. Then use the screws/nuts & washers to secure your drip pans to the bottom of the green pot.

Inside view of the attachment of the drip pans:

Now you will repeat the drilling process, but this time we will use 1/2” drill bit for our 1/2” plastic tubing. These will be where our fountains come out. We just did ours across from one another (think 9 and 3 o’clock positions).

Next, assemble your Tee. Cut 2 small pieces of tubing to come out of each of the holes you just drilled and attach them to your tee. Carefully push the tubing through the drilled holes so that they come out about 1 inch.

Here they are on the top:

Now we are ready for the pump! You can find these pumps in your local home improvement store where they sell the parts needed for outdoor ponds. We got all our parts for this project at Lowe’s.

We need to also cut a length of tubing to run from the bottom of the tee to the top of the pump (that little spout you see above). It’s important that when you cut this length of tubing, you make it long enough so that the pump sits on the bottom of the RED pot. Don’t’ just cut the length the height of the green pot, because it is sitting inside of your red pot and the two pots might not sit perfectly flat on the bottom! You want the water intake and the suction cup feet to be resting on the bottom of the red pot easily.

At this point we realized we needed a hole in the green pot for the cord of the pump to come through because our green pot fit nicely in the red pot leaving no extra room at at the bottom for the cord. So we just poked it through one of the holes in the cheap green pot! Pretty Easy.

Now place your green pot into your red pot.

Pull the pump cord through the pre-drilled hole.

Now you can fill your pot with water! I’d fill it about 2/3 the way full. Next plug in your pump. You might have to tweak your pump to get the flow going. This is why we do this now, before we put on all the rocks! Also, depending on the size of pump you have, you might need to close off the tubing to create some backpressure (yes I am a chemical engineer remember!) Otherwise you will have a running hose, versus a shooting fountain. We did this by just screwing some small screws through the tubing spouts to “close” them up a bit.

Once you have your water flowing…you can add some pretty rocks to the top. I just used rocks from my landscaping so it goes nicely on my back patio.

(After I took this picture, I also added another ring around the edge to cover mostly all of the drip pan. Now the water runs over the rocks, and to the edges of the drip pan and back down into the pot creating the “Infinite” effect!