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. …
Are those reeds for dragonflies?
yes and no - we don’t really know what we’re doing with this thing (I am reasonably comfortable with terrestrial plants, but not water plants) and so we just randomly got one of those pre-set up baskets that nursery’s sell… I guess they do that as well for water plants… Anyway - we realized that we didn’t have any other height in the water plants so hopefully that’ll work for them. We have sticks and bushes with some bare branches for the adults to perch on (and they do), but that’s the only thing we have at the moment for height in the water so hopefully it’ll serve for nymphs (if we get them… which I hope we do…). I didn’t want cattails (at least not yet) as they tend to completely take over around here…
Will it be difficult to upkeep the pond? Or do you think it will be pretty self-sustaining?
We’ll have to see - since we’re not trying to make it like ‘perfect’ (i.e. we’re going for the nature pond thing) I think it won’t be too bad. We took a bucket of water from a local pond to jump-start things and so we’ve got a few (native thankfully) snails eating algae, a ton of boatmen, etc. so there’s a mini-ecosystem starting. Hopefully it will not require too much in the way of upkeep, but if it does at least it’s small…
still learning lemmy - didn’t realize it was a picture at a time so here’s the tadpole evidence
please update us on these guys! Its a beautiful pond.
