So my wife decided that she wanted a pond for Mother’s Day (like small garden pond - we live in the burbs) and so she got one… Took longer than a day, but we at least started on Mother’s Day. Anyway - her ultimate goal was to get a ‘natural’ pond set up and get frogs to spawn in the pond… While we still need to do some work covering the liner at the top - it’s in and we filled it with water like 3 weeks ago… We now have tadpoles!! And a pair of mallards are using it for like a love nest or something - they come and go throughout the day, splash around taking baths, etc. …
I once bought a metal wash tub, put it on my porch, added sand, rocks, plants, fish and water… and called it a pond. It is pretty easy to do.
Anything that will hold water for a couple weeks will have tadpoles in it pretty quick.