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Pond Life

Jaime Eray
Dec 11, 2015
2 min read

My mom has way too much garden space, which is filling up with plants and a braai place and looking amazing. The goal is to steadily replace all the grass with garden beds. I have a fantastic Reader's Digest book full of gardening tips and ideas, including decorative features. I loved the idea of a water feature but the mothership insisted that stagnant water will only bring mosquitos and algae, and an electric water pump is too much maintenance. Solution: A pond with mosquito fish (they eat mosquito larvae, obviously).

I got to work, digging and digging and MORE digging (the dog helped and the cat watched).

The hole was lined with old PVC from a kiddy splash pool. Filled with borehole water and weighed down with bricks and rocks, it started looking like a construction site mess. Until we added the rubber ducky, that is.

Once it was full of water, I trimmed off the excess plastic and decorated the edges with interestingly shaped driftwood, pot plants and little ornaments. It would make a wonderful faerie paradise. I threw some rocks and shells into the depths so that the fish wouldn't miss out on the scenery. A real birdbath would have been nice, but I settled for a chipped old bowl.

And then it was time for the fishies! Three gorgeous goldfish, a million billion little mosquito fish, and a bucketful of tadpoles too. The rubber ducky keeps them company. A couple of different plant species (I don't know their names), and an evil floating plant that spreads like wildfire if not contained. It took a full afternoon to dig the hole and prep it for holding the water, and another day to decorate and clean up the mess I made around it.

Add the final of fairy lights in the bush nearby and solar lanterns around the edges, and ta-da! A magical little pond where the frogs can go on romantic dates (I know, because we can HEAR them from a block away). The dog and cat thankfully don't bother with water much, and the fish are too quick and smart to get caught.