A year's observations by an admitted beginner
In the summer of 1998, I made my first water garden, a small above-ground pond holding approximately 275 gallons of water, three types of water lilies, a lotus plant, and assorted underwater and bog plants. Through the autumn of that year, I neglected to keep a record of all the things that went on; therefore, I am attempting to correct that problem now.
Following are my observations, activities, and suggestions. As before, I do not claim to be an expert in water gardening, but I do hope these experiences will be of use to those of you who are interested in trying this kind of gardening.
So far, it has been an unusual winter in the Houston, Texas area. We have had considerably less cold weather than is customary, and even more strangely, far less wet weather. January and February tend to be the coldest and wettest months in this part of the United States; it is not uncommon to go several weeks without full sunshine and even several weeks with daily rainfall. This year, however, is starting out warmer and drier than normal.
Perhaps that explains the relatively good condition of the pond, considering that I took no steps to "winterize" it (indeed, I didn't know what steps I should take). The condition as of the last day of January is as follows:
Underwater Plants
These little buggers proliferate whatever the weather, as far as I can tell. The ananachris is everywhere; all six containers are full of new strands and strands, floating or semi-submerged, are abundant. Unfortunately, they have also served as a base for algae and they have clogged the surface of the containers of several other plants, but those seem to be holding their own and actually beginning to make progress.
Bog Plants
The bog plants took serious hits when we had heavy rains and near-freezing weather near the end of autumn. As of this writing, the dwarf bamboo looks dead, dead, dead. On the other hand, a week ago I would have said the same thing about the arrowhead and the saggitaria. I note many new sprouts coming up on the arrowhead, however, and I think I see the beginning of the same with the saggitaria.
The big surprise has been the parrot's feather. After looking nearly dead from the torrential rains of October, it has staged the Mother of All Comebacks. In fact, it's gone completely nuts in the cooler weather; at its height, it had spread new growth over about 30% of the pond's surface and it has even grown out of the pond itself and taken over one of the mulched areas. I've had to "groom" it (read, "tear a bunch of it out and throw it aside") to keep its roots from strangling the Queensland Pamela lily.
Floating Plants
The Colorado Lily stopped blooming far earlier than the rest of the blooming plants, and it stopped spreading pads and sending up new ones earlier, too. Plus, its pads have suffered all autumn and into this month from a plethora of little black spots that, I confess, I've been too lazy to learn about and eliminate. However, it's maintained good coverage over its container and even now, at what appears to be its low point in its growth cycle, there are at least twenty small (2" - 4") pads floating on the water.
The Green Smoke Lily is another story entirely. It punched out of the growth cycle earlier than any other plant in the pond; in mid-October it looked sickly and it stopped sending new pads above the water in early November. Algae has clustered heavily on its container and over the gravel that surfaces the container, but there are still two small, discolored-but-slightly-green, fish-nibbled pads floating and I see several more tiny ones just above the gravel. So, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
The Lavender Lady Lotus is both a disappointment and a pleasant surprise as of this writing. A disappointment because, even though I bought it supposedly during its blooming cycle, I never saw a bloom. And it died early, too; mid-October. But while looking at the pond and trying to decide what to do to replenish it today, I noticed something. Four bright green, slender stalks coming up out of the water. It's growing again, and showing more growth than any other plant except the parrot's feather. Perhaps this spring . . . .
The Queensland Anne's Pamela was the big winner of the pond last year. It remained in bloom quite late; even in early October it continued to send up blossoms, sometimes as many as three at a time. And its pads remained healthy fairly long into the autumn. Oh, by the way, many water gardening books say you must keep the lilies away from the waterfalls' spills. Something about them not liking moving water. I don't quite agree. I have the lily pots about three feet from the place where the water spills from the waterfall, and two are about two feet away from the pour-back from the biological filter, but the lilies covered much of the "busy" water space all the same. The Pamela was especially fond of sending fairly large pads into the waterfall spillway. They didn't last that long and they weren't the prettiest of the pads, but they survived it and kept coming back for more. I see several small pads under the surface of the water with the Pamela, and now that the parrot's feather no longer blankets it perhaps more sunshine will spur the growth cycle.
Exterior Scenic Plants
Oh, these have taken major hits. The butterfly bushes, the crepe myrtle, and practically everything else looks dead right now. It's probably too early to pronounce them extinct, but we'll see. The lantana did fairly well, and the palms--which I lazily left in their buckets (this year's plans include planting them in the soil) look sunburned. Stay tuned for updates on these plants.
Of Pumps and Filters
Throughout the summer and fall, I was plagued by the accumulation of algae on the sponge filters of the pumps. Even with regular (weekly) use of pond clarifier, I was still lucky if I could go two days without having to shut down a pump, pull the filter, rinse out the clottings of algae, put the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned things back together, and plug everything back in. Finally, in frustation, I pulled the filters completely and left the pumps running with only the plastic nozzles that the filters slip over protecting the pumps' inputs.
It has worked remarkably well. Neither one of my pumps has experienced any significant problem and they've been running constantly since I started the pond last summer. Three times since November, I have had to clean the nozzles as loose strands of ananachris and accumulations of string algae clogged them, but this was a much easier and quicker fix than rinsing sponges. Lift up the pumps, pull off the glommed-up nozzles, drop the pumps back in while you clean the nozzles, then repeat the process to reattach them. No muss, no fuss, relatively speaking.
That GREEN STUFF!
Lord, I hate algae. I don't care if it theoretically provides most of the oxygen on this world. I hate the stuff. I hate the little spherical junk that makes my pond look green and clogged the filters. I hate the eight zillion varieties that seem to relish finding ways to overcome the pond clarifier. And I especially hate string algae. That stuff spreads through the pond, attaching itself to everything and so smothering the lilies that I had to climb in there in early January (even in 60-degree air, pond water is cold!) and pull as much of it as I could with my hands.
This month, it concentrated on the waterfall. Yesterday afternoon I noticed the fall didn't seem to have any sound to it. I pulled the pump and found some ananachris blocking the nozzle, but not very much. So, then I checked the waterfall itself. The spigot seemed fine (there's no way to see it without doing a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids number so it was largely touchy-feely work) but the entire spillway was covered with string algae that must have been a quarter inch thick. It was a wet, green, soft, slimy blanket and it basically had so smoothed and rounded the sixteen steps of the spillway that the water was simply running down a gentle ramp and dropping into the pond. I attacked the stuff with a stiff brush and the pond is loud again. Of course, I screwed up; I didn't capture and toss the algae (it was cold yesterday!) and I'll see it all again soon. But it or its ninth cousins eleven times removed, it's all the same green gunk.
Fauna
Whatever predator obliterated two entire stockings of fish never reappeared. The frogs finally left. And when I stopped paying daily attention to the pond at the end of the summer, I had six tiny, nearly invisible rainbow dace and two comets--one a bright orange, one a pale white.
I have no clue how many dace are still in there, if any. I last saw three sometime in December. But I have lots of comets. At least a dozen. Most of them are quite small, all of them are brightly colored, and so far, none are popping to the surface, struggling to breathe, or otherwise indicating they're overloading the biological system. It would seem that the fish were male and female, and they did what fish do naturally.
Feeding has been haphazard, I have to admit. On several occasions I made a judgment call that the water was too cold and stopped feeding them to avoid having the food rot inside them. If they've been eating the ananachris, I can't tell. Whatever they are eating, they seem to be eating well. Oh, and FYI, the goldfish food that advertises itself as giving fish "brighter colors" works.
Nature isn't the peaceful, pastoral thing many writers make it out to be. Nature is unremitting, merciless warfare. And for all its sublime appearance on the surface, a pond is the quintessential example of this truth in microcosm. Even in their dormant states, the inhabitants of mine are engaged in a no-quarter melee for survival and domination.
Underwater Plants
The ananachris is still everywhere; unfortunately, most of it isn't attached to any of its original pots. It's floating around aimlessly, clogging pump inlets, trying to strangle out the bog contenders and the lotus, and generally making a nuisance of itself. Worse, it's become a ready-made home for the string algae that has declared its intentions on my little pool of tranquility with a vengeance. The fish are eating the ananachris (and for all I know, each other; see below) and so the blades are largely gone on many of the drifting strands, leaving only a dimpled cord that still manages to hang onto whatever its tail end finds each time I reach in to pull one out.
Bog Plants
The parrot's feather is giving the bedouinic ananachris, the string algae, and everything else a serious run for their money. Even though the weather has been, surprisingly, more moderate than it was in January, evidently this stuff really likes cooler temperatures. It has, at one point, covered nearly half the surface of the pond and it has spread dramatically into the mulched "shore" where the lantana is weathering the winter. The combination of the delicate, bright green feathery growths and the darker green leaves on the lantana vines is a nice contrast, but I wonder which will dominate the area ultimately. I suspect the lantana will, once warmer weather comes and it resumes its healthy spread.
The other bog plants remain inactive. The bamboo continues to inspire a dirge with its beaten, yellow-brown appearance. The arrowhead and sagittaria are gone.
Floating Plants
Only the Colorado shows any sign of life, with its dozen or so small pads, spotted and worn at the edges, clustered together like the last band of soldiers, determined to hold their ground against the hordes surrounding them. The colors are unimpressive, ranging from a brownish green to a pale green, both of them dull and listless.
There is no indication of life with the Green Smoke lily. One tiny, shriveled padlet stands slightly off of the knob that was its growth cluster in the fall. The stem is far too short for the pad to reach the water's surface.
The Queensland Anne's Pamela remains quiescent, with two infantile pads covered in string algae.
The Lavender Lady shows no sign of life.
Exterior Scenic Plants
No change.
Hardware
Pump maintenance is extremely high, largely because of the drifting ananachris' ability to clog the pump inlets. At least twice a week I am forced to close down the pump system, pull up the pumps, and disentangle ropes of the junk from the intake covers. I removed the sponge-like filters because they were forcing a daily cleaning on account of algae. I have inspected the pumps themselves twice and found no damage from removing the covers. Similarly, judging from the outflow on the waterfall and the biological filter, the absence of the pre-filters is not resulting in algae clogging the tubing. This is good. The labor intensity just on pulling underwater offal loose is enough to keep me busy.
The Green Meanies
If only I could learn to love algae, I would have no problem. But I cannot. It's ugly. It turns the water into pea soup and denies me a view of my fish. It plays merry hell with the spillway of my waterfall. The only good thing that can be said about algae is that it has covered the bricks supporting many of the pots so well that you cannot see the bricks any longer against the black (probably black-tinged-with-algae-green, now) bottom of the pond.
The waterfall is particularly hard victimized by the string algae. Every few days I notice that the waterfall doesn't sound right. Sometimes, this is due to debris clogging the pump intake but just as often it's the result of string algae building up on the spillway. My waterfall has seventeen steps, each of between one and three inches. As the string algae collects, it forms a carpet lying over those steps. In effect, it turns the "stairs" of the waterfall into a ramp, so that the water comes out at the top and just slides down a rounded incline until it drops into the pond again. Even at the drop, the string algae permits no comforting splash; it hangs down into the water and diminishes the sound. Perhaps some people like the visual effect of the waterfall. Certainly with a big one the visual is as important as the aural. But in this one, it's the sound that counts, and that damned algae is killing my sound.
Unfortunately, there's no easy and clean way that I can see to deal with this problem. I've taken to holding a bowl under the spillway and scrubbing the algae loose segment by segment. This is a time-consuming process; I can only clear a small section at a time because I have to stop and toss the bowl's contents before the water overflows it and spills the algae right back into the pool.
Elsewhere, I have taken to applying pond clarifier once each two weeks. It's hard to see what effect it's having. The in-water algae level is varying radically from day to day.
Fauna
No change. No frogs, thank God. Unfortunately, no hummingbirds, either. Then again, my hummingbird bushes look like victims of the fighting in the Balkans.
And almost overnight, everything changes, although still in small and, so far, quiet ways . . . .
Underwater Plants
The ananachris seems to be spreading even though all of the pots are now devoid of anchored strands, as far as I can tell. The parrot's feather retreated somewhat with a surge of warm weather at the beginning of the month but has resumed its campaign for domination of the water area as a cool snap visits the state here at the end of the "in like a lion, out like a lamb" period.
Though the ananachris seems to be thriving, it doesn't look thriving. It looks like old seaweed. I think a major replacement is in line in the near future.
Bog Plants
Tiny, seemingly ungrowing shoots still mark the position of the sagittaria's original location--but a healthy, and large, new sprouting dominates the center of the pond! The real surprise is that this new sagittaria is not a reborn growth of the original plant. It is a child, growing out of the same pot that the lotus occupies!a
The arrowhead is appearing, too, suddenly and without warning. Both plants have begun to bloom, although so far the white blossoms are sparse and small.
The dwarf bamboo fooled me completely. In the space of two days, it went from dead to vibrantly (well, as vibrant as bamboo can be) alive. The wind moving through the growth forces an unusual sound, the softer rustle of the new sprouts competing with the sharper, more "clacking" noises of the old brown stuff.
Floating Plants
No change in the Colorado or the Green Smoke.
Small but important changes in the Queensland Anne's Pamela, however! Two pads have appeared, have grown, and are moving toward the surface. They are still pale--the parrot's feather keeps trying to block their access to sunlight--but they are determined. I need to ask the people at Nelson's when I should begin fertilizing, and how much fertilizer to use.
The Lavender Lady Lotus has proven itself a competitor, too. As the sagittaria has grown, so has the lotus. Both are healthy and surprisingly large in their growths. Both, too, are being eaten by something. I will have to get some BT in case it's a worm of some kind, which I suspect it probably is.
Exterior Scenic Plants
It is just possible that by the end of next month the biological filter box will be invisible again. Sprigs are showing on the dwarf crepe myrtle. The butterfly bush beside it is alive, as well, but sickly looking; it is root-bound, I believe, and needs to be put into a real bed. The same is true of the palms that flank the waterfall. Bed-building now moves to a higher priority than I had hoped I would have to assign it.
Ah, well, one cannot have everything. But Bernardo is in serious trouble the next time I see him.
Hardware
Pump maintenance continues at the same pace, and for the same reason. Other than that, the hardware remains in good shape, except for the low-voltage lighting around the pond. The dogs have had a field day with several of the lamps, and the ants have taken a liking to several more. I will have to institute a change-out before too much longer.
Yes, Bernardo is in serious trouble.
Green, green, and more green
At least I have found a solution to the string algae problem on the waterfall. That is, I've found a solution to the problem of how to clear the spillway without risking the algae traveling right back into the ecosystem.
Collanders and 3M pads. What wonderful inventions. Hold the collander under the spillway, use the 3M pad to scrub the spillway clear, toss out the captured algae. It takes a quarter of the time the older way did.
Pond clarifier is now a weekly occurrence.
Fauna
No change in the fish, except that I am convinced the rainbow dace are gone. An out-of-pond predator may have gotten them but I think this unlikely. More likely is that they were eaten by the comets, or that they died and then were eaten. Either way, I have no sign of rainbow dace and no sign of their demise.
The High Ground
I am more than ready for some serious sunshine. I think everything in the pond needs it.
The month began with some warmer weather, but then it turned unseasonably cool again, and the pond's recovery suffered accordingly. Early in the month, Sar-Major and I undertook a general improvement operation on the area surrounding the pond (see The Perimeter, below) and once that was done I decided that the pond had taken about all the laissez-faire it could stand and took some steps to spark a new, and hopefully improved, look.
Underwater Plants
I waded into the water and did some fairly thorough hands-on examination of the subsurface growth. Yes, the ananachris was alive, and yes, it was completely unanchored to anything. So, out came the five pots that started the underwater planting last year. Out came the floating bits and pieces, too--and they pretty much were bits and pieces by now, between general wear and tear and the hungers of my forty-four inches of fish. It was time for a trip to Nelson's Water Gardens, and I put in six new pots of ananachris. The algae level decreased immediately, though not as much as I hoped or I thought the pond needed.
The parrot's feather went on a rampage with the return of the cool weather; the march of the green stuff didn't slow much when warmer temperatures arrived at last. "Oh, yes, it likes cool weather," one of the very helpful ladies at Nelson's told me. Uh, huh. That's about as much of an understatement as saying that Clinton's policy in Yugoslavia needs a little more thought about the exit strategy. With this month, I began a semi-weekly grooming of the parrot's feather. Oh, by the way, those who say parrot's feather is only a water plant are dead wrong. It's growing nicely onto the bricks that surround the pond, it's competing for the mulched area near the pond where lantana is planted, and I've even found strands that I'd pulled taking root directly in the mulch, far away from the pond's water.
Bog Plants
I was right; the sagittaria is growing with the Lavender Lady lotus! Again, my kind mentress at Nelson's told me this is the way sagittaria proceeds; it flowers, then drops the stems toward the water to find new ground in which to breed its next generation. Then the original stalks die out. Well, she was mostly right; new stalks began rising from the old pot within twenty-four hours of my having placed fertilizer tabs under the gravel.
The arrowhead has finally shown signs of serious recovery, too. It's much smaller than the sagittaria, which is surprising, since it was larger and hardier last year.
The dwarf bamboo is gone from the pond proper; according to the folks at Nelson's, it will grow nicely in the ground if watered relatively frequently, and so it has gone into the exterior scenic section.
A new addition is water hawthorne, which at this writing looks like a chaotic mass of long, thin leaves floating at the end of long, thin tendrils. Here and there tiny white buds appear. It isn't especially colorful, but it helps to cover the surface area as necessary, and being a small and fairly (so far, anyway) nonaggressive plant it is working nicely in a quiet section near the biological filter.
Floating Plants
I added a Queen of Siam lily in order to get some pad coverage quickly. The lily was already blooming and soon I'll add a photo of its lovely magenta star. I'm still far more partial to the Queensland Anne's Pamela but it still hasn't begun to bloom. In fact, it was limping along with three tiny pads, only two of which were even approaching the water, and then I fertilized just before the warm weather settled in. As of this writing, five pads, all floating nicely. They're small, but they're growing, and I see more unrolling underneath the surface of the water. Per Nelson's recommendations, I moved the pot a couple inches closer to the water's surface so that more light would reach the pads.
The Colorado is progressing and I think a bloom may appear in a week or two. The Green Smoke just flat disappeared; the result, I believe, of a number of frogs having s . . . well, celebrating life according to their instinctive imperatives . . . on the struggling little clump of plant.
The Perimeter
There were major changes in the exterior scenic arrangement. I obtained more landscape bricks and created a bed around three-quarters of the pond's perimeter, then mixed topsoil, peat moss, and hardwood mulch to form a semicircular flower bed. Into this I planted all the survivors of last year's potted plant-fest -- two butterly bushes, Mexican heather, several plants whose identity I couldn't give you if my life depended upon it, the dwarf bamboo, one of the three lantana, and several smaller plants. I added a couple of flats of colesia and zinnia, as well. Also added were three flowering irises and a second gazing ball, this one a deep blue on a tripod metal stand. Then I laid a soaker hose, weaving it through the plants, and I ran it for twenty minutes, every evening for two weeks. the results have been more than encouraging; everything is growing in nicely. Oh, and I sliced open the pots of the palms, banked the new soil up around them, and they're beginning to look a little less stressed, too. Twenty low-voltage lights completed the perimeter work.
Strings and Globs
I hate algae. I truly do. You cannot begin to imagine how much I loathe that messy green stuff. Yes, I know, most of the oxygen we breathe comes from algae and its related plant cousins.
I still hate it. And with the warmer weather, I'm now adding pond clarifier at least weekly, which is additional reason to hate algae. Because, you see, there is no simple, easy, clean way to use pond clarifier. You have to mix it with a quantity of pond water and then broadcast it by pouring it back through the biological filter's route. At least, that's the best way I've found, not having access to sprayers. In any event, it helps greatly against plain old in-the-water algae.
Nothing, however, seems to help against string algae, which loves to collect along the spillway of my waterfall. Guess what? When string algae carpets the sixteen steps, the waterfall stops being a stairstep fall. It becomes an inclined ramp--and instead of a nice, soothing, waterfall sound, you get a trickling sound that makes one think the pond has incontinence.
Fortunately, I've discovered a relatively easy way to clean a waterfall as small as mine. All you need is a collander and a toilet brush. Hold the collander under the spillway. Starting at the top, scrub the algae loose with the toilet brush. Stop whenever the collander isn't passing the water back into the pond and dump the algae out of the collander. With a waterfall like the one I have, it takes less than five minutes and you don't have to shut down the pumps.
Toadicide
Okay, this is probably going to upset the animal "rights" people out there, but I worked to control the toads this year. Following an all-night rendition of The Croaker's Chorus out there, I went into the pond the next morning. I found that toad eggs are easy, if disgusting, to remove. The female lays her eggs in long, encased strings, and if you don't mind scooping up this slippery stuff that looks and feels like oily rice noodles, you can get the vast majority of the toads out of there long before they hatch. Courtney objected until she saw what toad egg strings look like, whereupon she said, "That's disgusting, Daddy! Throw them away." Who am I to argue with the wisdom of an eleven-year-old?
I think there's a significant difference between the literature and reality in one respect, at least for small ponds that don't have inline pumps, and that reality has to do with keeping the pump intakes clean. The pumps I bought came with foam rubber filters that slipped over nozzles covering the pump inlets. I discovered last year that, no matter how clear the water appeared, the filters would clog with algae and had to be pulled off and rinsed out daily. Granted, gardening involves some maintenance work, but that seemed far too high to me. Leaving the filters off isn't much help, however; it eliminates the algae clogging but it invites debris, loose pieces of plants, and string algae to clutter the nozzles. The nozzles are fairly delicate plastic, too, and they tend to break. The nozzle on my waterfall pump broke off completely, and at 1,200 gallons an hour the intake had enough force to trap and behead one of my smaller fish.
However, I've found a simple and cheap solution to the problem. I took a medium-sized sports bottle, removed the top, and punched a couple dozen small holes in the plastic of the bottle. Then I took rubber bands, created a halter not unlike what one uses with a horse. I shut down the pumps, slipped the open end of the bottle over the nozzle (Note: Make sure the bottle's mouth is wider than the pump inlet!), slipped the halter around the pump, and lowered the assembly back into the water. It's been running for two weeks now without requiring any maintenance. The pump has more than enough pressure to suck the water through the holes in the bottle but the plastic is strong and resilient enough that the debris is blocked and doesn't go through. I'm not sure if the fish are happy, per se, but I imagine that, to the extent fish think about anything, they're pleased they aren't being decapitated because of swimming too close to the pump.
Underwater Plants
The ananachris continues to thrive. The water hawthorne isn't doing all that well; I can't figure out if it's in too deep, in too shallow, or just in the wrong place. Or, maybe the fish are giving it grief. By last count, there are eighteen of them, and are they hungry!
Bog Plants
There isn't much to report here. All are thriving. The sagittaria that went to bed with the lotus most of all; it's flowering heavily and as the stalks droop down into the pond it gives things a somewhat run-down appearance. Grooming time. ~Sigh~
Water Lilies and Lotus
I'll start with the latter. The lotus is doing fine; well, it is now, after I've gone to war against the crawlies (see below). The lilies are in great shape, overall, with the Queen of Siam putting up two and sometimes three blossoms at once, and the Queensland Anne's Pamela matching the Queen blossom for blossom. After many fits and starts, the Green Smoke is finally putting out pads of a decent size. I've moved it to quieter water, away from either the waterfall or the biological filter's outflow pipe, and raised it nearer the surface. That and fertilizer seems to be helping. The Colorado is an oddity right now, however. It is lush with pads, most of which are above the water, but so far it's only produced one bloom.
Night Music
I am coming to the point where I loathe, detest, abhor toads. Every night . . . every single night . . . another amphibian serenade. The worst was early in the month, when in the course of an hour and a half I gleaned and evicted no less than eighteen of the little buggers! After which I gave up, of course. Spend all night awake, tossing toads so that the toads wouldn't keep me awake all night? It didn't seem like a viable plan after the first ninety minutes. On the other hand, I haven't noticed a large number of tadpoles as the result of the froggy f--the amphibians' love in the moonlight. Perhaps the first great culling gave the fish a chance to do their jobs when the lesser numbers of the second string joined the game. Who knows?
Crawling Nuisances
Worms. Caterpillars. Call them what you will, these little fuzzy white wigglers plagued me for almost a week. They liked the arrowhead but they were especially partial to the lotus. The solution? BT. This is wonderful stuff, and I recommend it to every gardener, water or terrestrial, or anyone who just doesn't like crawling munchers on their plants. BT is a non-chemical pesticide. It's a bacterium, probably genetically engineered. I don't know how they came up with it. I only know it works. Spray this stuff on any plant affected with worms and in a day, two at the most, you won't have worms anymore. The worms ingest the bacteria both by eating the sprayed plants and by inhaling the mist through their spirochetes. The minute the bacteria goes to work, the worms stop eating. A day later, they die. Now, here's the really good part: BT doesn't hurt anything else! Other insects, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants are unaffected. In fact, the local wasps and dragonflies seem to be quite happy I'm using this stuff, as do the fish; spray the worms and the next day, it's caterpillar smorgasbord.
June, 1999: Dog Days
There's nothing new to report this month, except on the pump circuit. All plants continue as they did in May, with the exception that the water hawthorne appears to have died. I've fertilized it, and we'll see.
Of matters vacuous
My experiment with the sports bottle failed, after three and a half weeks of relatively good service. I say "relatively good," because I still had to clear the pump (in this case, the bottle covering the pump inlet) a couple of times a week. The biggest problem turned out to be drifting strings of ananachris that would come into the suction field, be sucked through the holes I'd punched, and get snared in the pump. Eventually, I came out one morning to discover a trickle from the waterfall. Oh, the pump was running merrily, but a large string of ananachris had worked its way through a hole, jammed the pump enough that water wasn't getting through in enough volume, and the pump was sucking the covering bottle inside out. So, I substituted the bottle for a smaller plastic bottle, a vitamin bottle. The neck of the bottle fits the pump inlet exactly. And instead of punching holes with a knife (which led to tears, which grew . . . you see the problem), I bored holes with a screwdriver. Same problem, eventually, but in smaller scope. The bottle still gets sucked into odd shapes. Finally, I've gone to a long round tin that formerly held Walker's Shortbread Rounds, with holes drilled in the sides and bottom and a large hole in the removable top to slip over the pump inlet. So far, it's working, although the can is dented and battered from my drilling. It will never be pretty again. Oh, well, it's in two feet of water; who cares what it looks like? The fish?
July, 1999: Definitely not bogged down!
This has been a most quiet month. Everything within the pond has done well. Aside from the Colorado's unwillingness to generate blooms, where have been no significant developments. On the outside of the pond, however, there have been some interesting activities. Two of the so-called bog plants have decided that the like being terrestrial as well. In the case of the dwarf bamboo, it was a matter of march or die; well, of "root" or die. Last spring, I removed it from the water and planted it in my new flower bed surrounding the pond. It survived. Oh, Lord, did it survive! It's engulfed one of my scenic lights, is threatening to suffocate a Mexican heather (which until I encountered this bamboo I thought was the most aggressive plant there was!), and is making serious eyes at the void space between itself and the palms. I'm going to have to watch this carefully and be prepared to cut the bamboo back if it continues its expansion.
The other development is the parrot's feather. It's decided that it likes living on land just as much as in the water. Not only is it continuing to struggle for dominance near the Queensland Anne's Pamela lily, but it's working its way through the lantana on the brickwork outside the pond. I've even found sprigs of it growing as "new" growth in the soil of the lower bed itself. These were elements I'd groomed from the water growth and tossed into the yard; some of them landed in the bed and went to work.
August, 1999: Extremes
Well, as the result of a momentary lapse on my part, I now can attest to the ruggedness of the biological environment inside my pond. You see, August has been hot. After a relatively below-normal summer, August ushered in the real season with a vengeance. Long, nearly cloudless days conspired with the waterfall and the bio-filter's feedback to increase the evaporation rate on my pond, and so I needed to add new water every three or four days. And, well, one morning I hooked up the hose, turned it on . . . and left for work without remembering to turn it off. Oh, I did remember it. At 1330 that afternoon--by which time the hose had been running full-tilt for more than four hours. I returned to find that the flower bed and the yard around the pond were very well watered, and my pond had the most beautifully clear water I've seen in more than a year. Well, I shut off the water, poured chlorine/chloramine neutralizer into the pond, ran a gallon of water with pond clarifier through the bio-filter, and added a healthy dose of beneficial bacteria to the water, and then I hunkered down and waited for everything to die, wilt, shrivel, gasp, fall over, float to the surface dead, or whatever. To my amazement, there were no casualties. The fish all thrived and the unscheduled transfusion of "civilized" medium didn't even affect their as-usually-ravenous appetites. The lilies, etc., were just fine. Oh, and the bamboo (that dratted plant!) grew even more. ~Sigh~
September through December, 1999: Business as Usual
And so the year ran to an end. I know, this seems like a cheap way to end an annual; it lumps four months together. But four months passed without any significant developments. The fish still live--although two have given up the ghost when the always-requiring-attention pump filter fell off and they ventured too close to the pump inlet. Fish do not move well through a three-quarter-inch hose.
Given the warmness of our autumn, the lilies kept growing until mid-December; I still have, as of this writing (the end of January, 2000), a bloom remaining on the Queen of Siam. All the other plants figured out that it was the end of the year and went into their year-end routine; the terrestrial plants went dormant, and once again I am engaged in a battle of wills with the Parrot's Feather as, responding to the chilly weather, it tries to take over the pond.
I'll see you next year with a new journal!
I welcome your suggestions concerning water gardening.