The idea of this section is for members to share stories about their ponds.  To help get you thinking, here are some tidbits about my pond adventures.

My father had three ponds so I was bitten by the ‘pond bug’ at an early age.  When my husband and I finally had our own house and yard, I of course wanted some water.  We had a tiny suburban yard in Rochester, NY.  One early summer afternoon, I went out and dug a small pond.  After I put in some goldfish and a water lily, my husband was hooked too.  We dug a slightly bigger one the next year.  Of course, that wasn’t enough, we wanted running water!

After several sketches, we came up with a new design.  We had basically two ponds connected by a waterfall.  We bought some dirt so we could raise the first pond.  I scavenged some concrete patio pavers from a neighbor.  We built a retaining wall on the backside of the raised pond with the pavers.  We horded rocks from our neighbors and friends.  After one long weekend, we had our new pond!

As an added bonus, the sound of the waterfall could be heard from the kitchen window.

The second summer we found as many as 17 frogs visiting the pond.  One we named Boo as he was rather tame.  We could actually ‘pet’ him a little before he jumped.  New visitors frequently asked if he was a real frog since he didn’t jump right away.

Birds visited the pond a lot.  They liked to bath in the upper waterfall.  We had sparrows, robins, cardinals, and cedar waxwings splashing away.  It was fun to watch them take turns.  The smaller birds always waited for the bigger birds to finish before they bathed.

We had goldfish to keep the mosquitoes away.  We had six that lived with us for about five years.  We brought them inside for the winter months and even named them.  Much to our surprise, the summer of the their fourth year, the goldfish mated.  We had over thirteen new fish by the fall!  We tried to bring them all inside, passing several off to our neighbor’s to keep.  Even though part of the pond was below the frost line and would not freeze during the winter, I didn’t think the small fish would survive.  Imagine our surprise when we went to put the big fish back into the pond the next May and found six small fish all ready for summer!

When we moved to Ames, we were sad to leave the pond behind.  We just couldn’t figure out how to move the six big goldfish halfway across the country.  Plus, we knew there wasn’t a pond here to put them in.  I did bring half the cattails and one of the water lilies though.

We got a Christmas card from our Rochester neighbors that included a picture of a new bird visiting.  This blue heron wasn’t so welcome as he ate every goldfish in the pond.

Even though we’ve been in Ames just a year and a half, we already have our pond plans.  In fact we have one pond, our formal pond, already dug.  We’re still looking for just the right water feature – an elephant spraying water over himself!  This year I hope to start the informal ponds.  We scavenged the rocks already…