The Fall Garden

I love this time of year; the cool mornings and evenings show a glimpse of the winter that is to come, and warm afternoons give us a last look at summer. Soon we will be winterinzing our ponds just in time for the flurry of activity that is part of our holiday season.

Our adventure in water gardens began almost by accident. When we moved here, our eight year old daughter found a frog on the pation and just had to have a lily pad for it to sit on. I didn't have any idea where to get a plant with lily pads and just happened to drive by a nursery by our house and stopped to ask. I left there with not only a water lily, but a little preformed, peanut-shaped plastic pond. Instead of doing work on the house needed for us to move in, I was out in the yard digging a hole to put this little pond in.

After we got the pond installed and level, with lily in place, we found out that the frog was really a toad, and that it had no interest at all in sitting on a lily pad. But by that time we were hooked, and had to add to our little water feature. We bought goldfish, a water dog, more plants, and a little fountain. By winter, we were visiting the pond every day to see how the little inhabitants were doing. That winter we had a hard freeze and the little pond had a thick layer of ice over it. I was sure the fish wouldn't survive, but we could see them moving even under the ice.

When spring came, we were ready to start digging a bigger pond with a rubber liner. We still didn't know anyone with a pond, we didn't have internet access, and our library didn't have much in the way of pond books, so we blundered forward and put this pond under a fruitless mulberry tree. By then we had several favorite fancy goldfish, several lilies, and assorted marginals. Then, a neighbor thoughtfully brought some crawdads and put them in our pond while we were out. I noticed that the fan tails of the goldfish were looking a little ragged, and the culprits were discovered. We had to drain the pond to get all the crawdads out.

By summer, our daughter, who was then nine, wanted some frogs. Even though our street lies between two creeks, none of the neighboring frogs had ventured over. Hubby knew someone with a stock pond, so one night, armed with nets and bug repellent, we went frog hunting. We came home with several leopard frogs, a tree frog, and at least one bullfrog, and most of them decided to call our pond home.

A couple of years of cleaning leaves out of brown-stained water, and we decided to move the pond out from under the tree. By now we were on the internet and had a few books on pond-building, so this pond looked a lot better. We reused the liner, so it was the same size and shape as the previous pond, but the edges were finished better and we added shelves for the marginals. We also added a bigger submerged pump with a filter. After we finished this one, severla of our neighbors put in ponds and we shared plants and fish. Soon we added our first koi and our complete. Or so we thought. Next pond.