Pond Life
Posted: Sat 16 May, 2009 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Green Garden 1 Comment »This morning, our lovely garden maintenance man came round, and we now have a small pond in the garden.
It’s been part of the plan for a while, but we hadn’t got round to getting it done. And now it is.
It’s not really planned to be a decorative/ornamental pond, more of a wild-life one, so we’ve had to think about the best ways to make it work. As it is, it’s got railway sleepers round the edges (which we’ll then probably cover with wire in order to stop Hound getting into it) with gaps so that animals can find their way in/out without too much hassle.
The main things we expect to use it will be the copious numbers of frogs and toads we’ve got in the area – I’d be very happy to have it get populated with frogspawn every year, but have no idea how long that may take – and possibly the odd hedgehog or whatever. That’s the plan, anyway.
Of course, now we also need to buy some plants to put in it – again, nothing massive, but enough to keep it oxygenated and clean. I don’t know whether we’ll bother with fish in it – we might, we might not.
But all the same, we now have a pond. That’s quite cool by any estimation.
Oh, lovely. Fish will eat tadpoles, so I’d not bother in a small pond. And don’t put in too much weed, as it spreads and you’ll spend more time than you expect clearing it out after a year or so. I am sure you’ll have frogspawn next spring, frogs are always on the lookout for a new site. Some big stones for frogs to sit on are good.
The best thing in the world (well, it seems so at the time) is when you glance in to the pond in the morning and see the tadpoles are just starting to hatch out. I have spent an entire day, just watching.