The Watergarden Bug

(Note: This happened in 1999 or 2000, so these are all old film photos from back then. i'm happy that i'm finally putting these "out there" - i kept misplacing the actual hard copies!)

No, not a water strider or mosquito - i mean the thing you get in your MIND that you HAVE to have a body of water in your yard! i got the bug as hubby and i were at the open house the Realtor was having at what WOULD become our current residence. The Realtor was pointing out what a large yard there was and telling us that there was plenty of room for a swimming pool. i thought to myself,***Pool? Heck, no! i want me a POND! With fish and plants and frogs and a waterfall and a stream and snails and stuff!"***

And so, in the spring following our moving in, i started digging. OK, i didn't go REAL crazy - just bought a 60 gallon (227 Liter) hard plastic preformed thing, but it was enough to start. i have heard that you should always go big at first, to prevent having to replace it with a bigger one later ('cause all us "ponders" always do!), but i disagree. i was glad i started - and made my mistakes - with a smaller pond (NOTE: i AM referring to watergardens - 'pond' is just less to type!). This one had no filtration system (except plants and fish ~ the rock "waterfall" was just for looks, too), and it was fine - even had more fish in the Fall than what i started with, if you know what i mean..;o)
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After a couple of years, we did want to expand, so we went to a local watergarden shop in our area that gave free classes on how to install ponds, and just about got frightened out of the whole idea! This place really went all out (and of course, wanted the class participants to purchase the supplies from THEM), and if we followed all of their advice it would have cost us a small fortune!

So i started researching the whole pond building thing myself and discovered that, while watergardens CAN be a lot of work and expense, they really don't have to be! More about THAT later...back to pond building...

Here's a photo (below) of our initial sod removal in the shape of the new pond - quite a size difference! The only thing i wish we'd done differently was to keep the front of the pond where it was and not dig another foot closer to the sunroom - it's a little tight there now.

...So here it is a couple of days into the digging (below)- note the chairs in the shade - we had, in our usual bad timing, picked the only week that YEAR that was in the mid 90's (F)...ALL week!

More confusing info you'll find is the "to shelf or not to shelf" debate. There are good reasons for both configurations, but i can tell you that i am glad we have shelves - first of all, i would have no idea how to get INTO the pond without a step of some sort - it gets extremely slippery in there within days. Second, the shelves are very convenient for marginal and bog plants - in fact, i wish we had made them shallower than they are.

And last but most important, we got tired of shoveling and trying to find places to put the soil!!! After building up the waterfall area, the whole margin of the pond, AND two planting hills behind it in the yard, we were fed up with the whole digging thing! We finally looked at each other, said "Screw it!", and called it done!

The stick is for checking the level of the sides, and that large bucket is actually the biological filter we had yet to install.

The rubber liner going in. TIPS- don't let this stuff lay on your grass - it'll be killed in a hurry (no, we didn't do that - we were warned ahead of time!). Also, we didn't put any cushion or underlayment underneath - didn't have many roots or rocks around, and it hasn't been an issue - but i would still recommend it, because now, any time we lose water, i immediately worry that it's a stick or root cutting thru the bottom of the liner! So just for your peace of mind, put underlayment if you can. i know there are liners that have the underlayment already attached - wow, i cringe to think about how heavy THAT would be!

This is me in the pond - i was pretty overweight then, so this is all i'm showing you!

(To this day, when someone asks my spousal unit what he dug the pond with, he says, "With my wife!"). Sigh....

While we were lucky and had lots of pretty fieldstone for the taking from hubby's grandparents' farm, it was rounded and not good to use for the first layer. Here was our Big mistake, though  - my idea was to use cheap concrete patio blocks for the perimeter. Found out later that they were soaking in the water and leaching LIME into it, throwing the PH completely off kilter! We had to invest in a load of shale to replace it all, which was NOT fun! But anyway, that's how we started.

Couldn't wait to put plants in, even before it was finished!

Here's my guy, working on the patio blocks and waterfall. We did not mortar any rocks together, still not sure if that was a good thing or not. They do shift during the winter, but they were much easier to move when we had to get to the back of the filter when we had a leak. So,  there's good points and bad points to not mortaring, too.

Plants going around the outside. Once again, i saved a lot of money because i had so many plants in the gardens. i just divided or transplanted them and only purchased a couple of "special" plants.

From the other side

Before mulch...

...And after mulch!

And here ~ A year later...!

The End  LOL

Fish: Inside And Out

                                    Male Guppies

When i was a child, i went to a county fair and won a silver goldfish in one of those  games along the midway. Thee fact that it was a SILVER goldfish was - i thought- the greatest thing (even back then i liked the unusual).. Of course, i learned later on that the silver color is the "junk" color, the color of feeder fish! But i thought it was cool! Anyway, in a few months, i had the whole shmear: the tank, the filter, some "gold" goldfish to keep the silver guy company, and it grew from there as well. i eventually had several tanks, tropical fish, plants, snails, catfish, breeding tanks, etc., and became quite the young fish expert! i especially liked the live-bearers (as opposed to egg layers), most notably Fancy tailed Guppies.

Female Guppy (...notice the EYES in her belly!)

 They came in brilliant combinations of colors, the sexes were easy to tell apart, they bred constantly, and it was fun to watch the babies grow inside of the mothers' bellies and predict when they would be born. That was some of the most interesting stuff i did during my childhood!
The funniest part about this is when i met my husband to be, he told me that HE had been into tropical fish during his younger years, and had tanks all over HIS parents' house! We now own a 72 gallon tank in our house, but it is mostly his fish - i'm more interested in my fish in our watergarden.
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