In this easy to follow tutorial, we show you how to make a solar powered waterfall for a fairy garden.
We recently decided to convert our raised vegetable beds into a large herb garden. A herb is any plant whose leaves, seeds, or flowers are useful for flavouring, food, medicine, fragrance or other useful applications.
We have six raised beds available for our herb garden. We have already planted three, while two are still covered with plastic until we are ready to plant them. Earlier this week we made a start on the one the kids, and I are most excited about. – Our fairy herb garden.
Our fairy herb garden will house all the beautiful miniature herbs that would get lost in our other beds. It will also be home to some of the fairy craft projects that we make. To make the build manageable, we plan to build and plant it in sections. And as with any garden, we needed to start with the hard-landscaping first.
When I talked to the kids about they wanted in the garden, a fairy waterfall was the top of the list. We didn’t have the budget or inclination to spend lots of money on garden features, so enlisted the help of my brother who is brilliant at doing electronic projects with the kids and he helped us put together the solar powered pump.
The parts used for the solar powered pump are:
- 5V Submersible pump
- 6V 3amp Solar Panel
- 4-20V to 5V Step Down Voltage Regulator – This is the chip which converts the output from the solar panel to a steady 5V for the pump
- Wire & Tube
The total cost of parts was around £5.
You simply solder the solar panel to one end of the chip and the pump to the other.
We housed the chip in a small plastic box and used lots of hot glue around the entry exit holes to make it watertight. It would be fine to bury the box under the soil although we hid ours under a rock. We also put plenty of hot glue over the soldered connection to the solar panel to make it watertight.
There are also various fish tank & pond kits available which could be easily modified to do the job from as little as £20, but as we already had all the parts (and his knowledge), we made it ourselves.
Building the Waterfall.
We found most the materials used in the structure of our waterfall in our garden. One exception was the pond liner offcut which we found at the garden centre, and got for a pound.
We started with a few pieces of brick to give our mound some stability. Then simply used soil dug out of another section of the bed and our water reservoir to create our slope.
To make sure we didn’t lose too much water, we used the pond-liner strip and two half pipes to make sure it all channelled back to the reservoir.
We also used one of the pipes to protect our plastic tube carrying our water from the pump. The video below shows everything working before we added our rocks.
To see our little waterfall running, please check out the video below
For more Fairy Garden inspiration check out our gorgeous miniature acorn cap LED lights and our Gourd Fairy House.
16 comments
This is just wonderful, you have great ideas and follow thru with them! Great role model for the children.
Does your brother have a store or website where he gets the solar parts? Can he recommend a book for learning this sort of thing?
Please keep up the good work. Thank You
My brother tends to buy most of his electronic parts in bulk via eBay as he always has projects on the go. He suggests Instructables for LED lighting tutorials – he’s been very impressed with the tutorials he has seen on there 🙂
This is so cool Sarah, and is going to be so cute when all done. I didn’t know that you could make a solar waterfall. Love it!
We’re having such fun coming up with ideas for our fairy garden Linda, it’s become my new obsession!
This is so cool Sarah, and is going to be so cute! Can’t wait till you get it finished. I did not know that you could run and pump by solar. I have been wanting a small pond with a fountain for the wildlife around, and frogs so maybe they will stay out of the pool. But there’s not any electricity where I want it, and I didn’t want to string out a electical cord. This is something to think about. I’ll have to see if I can talk the hubby into it.
Thanks Linda. Taking electricity out into the garden is a bit of a pain so it’s interesting to have a play with some solar options. We’re trying out some little solar lights too on our next part od the fairy garden 🙂