Pond Redo

It looks like I may redesign the pond this winter. I've been meaning to completely finish it - decide on a permanent design and lay the flagstone with mortar - but I've had things happen. There was a leak in the bog that was a major fix - now there is another leak, so I've quit circulating the pond through the bog. It's slowly drying out - I've watered a few of the plants - but I have to find a new home for most of them in the near future.

One of the reasons I've had problems with the bog is I didn't invest the money in this project that I should have. In hind sight, I wouldn't have spent the extra money to do it right. We didn't have the money to do it that way - we were relying on mostly donated materials and my own sweat equity. I probably bit off a little more than I could chew, and did what I could with what I had. The way I should have done it was to make the bog and the pond out of a single piece of pond liner, rather than the two that I used. I also used about the cheapest liner I could find for the bog - twice!

I'm redesigning the pond/bog to use the current pond liner for both the pond and bog. obviously the pond will be smaller with a very small area used for a bog. I will probably plant some of the other bog plants in the ground around the pond - I just have to make sure they get the extra moisture they need to thrive. Maybe I'll make a bog in the ground like I've seen lots of places around the internet. I'll put most of the carnivorous plants in that area or in pots - the one that's in a pot seems to be doing fine. I have a design in mind for all of this , but I won't know exactly what it will look like until I get in there and get digging.

Spring Cleaning

When I walked outside yesterday morning, the amount of spring gardening chores briefly overwhelmed me. I think I had gone out there to lay out the new landscaping - smother grass and mulch - but I saw weeds to pull and lantana to prune and a pond to clean. After a little weeding and pruning, I got to the mulching. I've been saving our newspapers during the past several months for just this purpose. I also had several bags of shredded leaves that I was saving for this as well.

I didn't plan to mulch the whole area that day, but I thought I would do as much as the leaves lasted. I spent an hour or so laying down newspaper - about four sheets thick - and then spreading leaves over it. I probably mulched half the area I needed to cover - one side being an arc near where I plan to put a stone path from the lawn to the gate. I've been planning to do this with broken concrete instead of for cost reasons. I hadn't looked for any recently, but there was a post on craigslist yesterday for someone to haul off broken concrete, so I plan to do that before the weekend.

We had plans for the mid afternoon, but I realized it was a good day to clean out the pond. I was going to have to get in it and clean all the dead leaves and plants out of it. When I was knee-deep, it wasn't bad - it was 65 degrees - but it took a little getting used to when I had to squat down to reach the bottom. I managed to finish and take a shower in time for our plans. Overall, it was a productive day.

Caveat Emptor

I've offered my assistance to a few friends and neighbors as far as starting out vegetable gardening and they seemed to have appreciated it. I hope it works out for them, but I do want to say that I have had no formal training in horticulture or gardening. I have done a lot of reading on topics that I enjoy, like succulents, vegetables and water gardening. I have also been forced to learn about certain plants, when I find a good deal on one or when I find one on the street or when Robin brings one home. I haven't done too much reading on other important areas, like soil quality, pest and diseases. I planned to spend time reading this winter, but with planning the veggie garden and the realization that we truly have a four season vegetable garden here in South Carolina, I haven't had time. I should also mention that can be a big TV junkie at times.

I try to tell it like it is on this blog - my successes and failures - and whether something I'm doing is new or it's worked for me before. I hope people will learn from my mistakes as I have, so they don't waste the time and energy on a losing technique. I'm not saying mine are the best for everybody, but I hope my experience will help someone out there.

Ramblings

I'm gearing up for Spring planting by laying out new beds, trying to maximize our space. I was going to interplant vegetables with other landscape plants, but I came up with a garden plan that I like - separate from other landscaping. I still may plant a few veggies other places, especially those that need room, like pumpkins and watermelons.

I bought onions and potatoes today, and, as usual, I bought more than I have room for - so I'll have to find places for them elsewhere in the yard - maybe. I was out in the yard today and realized I had room for an extra bed or two, and I'll need them if I want to plant all of the potatoes I bought. It also means I need to get moving on building the beds and filling them - so I can hurry up and plant. Looking at my raised beds, I realized the first one I built is different than the second one - the one I'm basing my future beds on. To see the first bed, click here.

The pond has been looking sad lately. It needs to be cleaned out, but also the pumps were slowly getting clogged - causing the waterfall to slow to almost a trickle. I really didn't want to have to stick my hand in there for any length of time. I thought it would only take a few minutes so I decided to brave it this afternoon. I got them cleaned out within about ten minutes, and the waterfall is rushing again. Getting a close look at the pond today made me realize that I need to clean out leaves, dead plants, etc. I remember last winter draining the pond halfway, wading in and cleaning leaves off the bottom, but that will have to wait for a very warm day - today the water temperature was 56 degrees!

Garden Injury

TO DO LIST:
Trim Trees
Work on the Pond
Plant Ferns
Work on Raised Bed
Cut Grass

These are some of the things on my list of things to do this weekend. I've been collecting concrete blocks for the raised bed vegetable garden. Originally I planned 4 x 8 raised beds using cinderblocks. The blocks would also give me additional planting holes. I started laying out the bed this week and 4 x 8 is too big if you factor in the extra eight inches of the blocks on each side and the ends. Unfortunately the bed will have to be smaller for me to be able to reach the center comfortably. On the plus side, I won't need as many concrete blocks.

Last week, maybe longer ago, I bought several hardy ferns from Lowe's on clearance. I've never seen them on sale before, so I felt I had to grab them. I've been meaning to plant them, but I just hasn't happened.

Recently I noticed a small but steady loss of water in the pond, more than I thought there would be with just evaporation. I noticed a constant wet spot on one of the timbers lining the bog. I figured out that it was probably water running over the liner not where it was supposed to go. I disconnected the pump to the bog until I could get around to redirecting the flow of water from the bog.

I had plans to trim the two massive trees in our yard. One is a large Magnolia behind the garage where, if I can trim it back enough, I'd like to put a chicken coop in the not-too-distant future. The other in the old Oak tree in front of our house. We're starting to get some low-hanging limbs and I wanted to cut those back. They were beginning to get in the way of power lines, cars and us.

Friday afternoon, I decided that the Magnolia could wait and I wanted to start on the Oak. I got the ladder out and a few tools - handsaw, tree saw and loppers. There was a lot of dead stuff in the tree, so I began by pulling most of that stuff out - I tried the loppers on a few branches, but they were two big, so I got out the tree saw. I would hold the branch still with my right hand and saw with my left. I successfully cut a couple of the branches before the accident happened. The part of the branch I was holding was lower than the part that I was cutting. When it slipped out of the groove I was cutting, gravity and the force of pulling on the saw directed it down the branch where my hand was - dragging the saw across the back of my hand. It didn't bleed much, but it looked pretty gross. I cleaned it, put some antibiotic ointment on it and a couple of band aids and we left to go to the doctor.

WARNING - GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS

Once there, Dr. Morgan saw me fairly quickly. I'm not sure if they realized how bad it was then, but after they got a look, they were disappointed that their students had left for the day. My injury was actually two deep cuts very close together with a thin strip of skin between them. He said I would definitely need stitches and that I was lucky that it wasn't any deeper or I would have nicked an artery. Dr. Morgan proceeded to numb the area and once that was accomplished, he pulled out the needle and thread and started sewing me up. To this point I wasn't queazy at all, but when it was time to do the stitches, I decided not to watch. I got over that quickly and tried to see what was going on, but his hands were in the way for the most part. It was fascinating that, with just six stitches, everything was pulled back together. My biggest disappointment about this whole thing - besides feeling like an idiot for getting hurt - is not getting to be in the yard doing the stuff on the list.

Pond Saga, Part 2

Pond Saga, Part 1

In a perfect world I should have dug the bog the same time I dug the pond. I would have bought a liner that fit both of them together. That would have cost more money and time that I had. Once the pond was up and running I began digging the bog. After I was finished, I laid the PVC liner in the hole and draped it over the edge, into the pond. The extra pump I had would pump water from the pond and to the bottom of the bog, where it would filter up and spill back where it came. Now came the hard part - buy, transport, wash and dump 15 to 20 cubic feet of pea gravel in the bog. It comes in 1/2 cubic foot bags that weigh almost 50 pounds each. At the time I was going to Lowe's on a regular basis, so I would buy 4 or 5 bags at a time. I would dump each of them in my wheelbarrow and hose them down until the waterat washed out was mostly clear, then dump the gravel into the bog - it took a long time. I still look at the bog sometimes and think I could use a few more bags!

Once it was done, I started collecting plants to put in it. I actually went out and paid full price for a couple of things. I already had some regular papyrus and elephant ears and, at a water garden plant swap, I got some cattails, pickerel rush, a bog lily and some floating plants like water hyacinth and water lettuce. So, I bought a really neat dwarf papyrus and some water irises. The bog has been an experimental garden for me. I spent most of the next year planting and re-planting things, either because they grew too much or not at all. I used to have as much as half of the bog to experiment with, but I've pretty much settled on what I want in there now. About a foot and a half square, closest to the front of the bog, I've planted carnivorous pitcher plants and similar plants that I'm happy with.

Initially the pond turned green, but about six weeks after the bog was up and running, the water cleared up and stayed that way until recently when I had trouble with the bog...

Recently I had decided to pull some of the plants out of the bog to divide and give away to friends with ponds. After I dug out the plants, I would put them in pots before returning them to the bog, so the roots wouldn't take over, like they had done in the past. I knew I shouldn't have sone this but, I did it anyway - I used a garden fork in the bog and ended up putting holes in the liner! Once I found out - empty pond will let you know - I unplugged the pump to the bog and started shoveling out pea gravel in order to uncover the hole. After days of finding holes, learning how to patch them, patching them, and finding more holes, I finally decided to buy a new liner. I got one similar to what I had before - when it arrived, I opened it up and discovered that it had a hole in it! I thought there was a chance I had put the hole in it when I opened the box, but upon further inspection, I realized I couldn't have done it. That was good news, because I was already feeling pretty sorry for myself. The company was nice enough to send me another liner free of charge. Once I got that, I proceeded to deconstruct the bog, put the liner in and build it back. I'm happy with how everythig turned out and I will not be doing that again!

Pond Saga, Part 1

A little more than two years ago we got a pond. It was pretty close to being a spur of the moment decision.  My daughter saw a neighbor's koi pond and wanted one, and I said, "we'll see". Soon after I was talking with my co-worker Billy about his pond and he offered us a 100 gallon preformed pond he had sitting in his garage. So begins the pond saga.

To start with, I dug a hole and put the pond in the ground and filled it with water. I bought a pump, but I didn't by a filter yet, because Billy said we could build one and save money. He's a real do-it-yourselfer which I like. It fits in well with the fact that we have no money! While we were waiting on Billy to be free, we went ahead and got about a dozen little goldfish. I figured they would be fine without filtration for the moment and they were. Eventually we got the filtration system going with a little waterfall and we started adding plants. That's when it dawned on me - the pond opened the door to a whole new world of plants.

Billy gave us some papyrus and we got some water lettuce and water hyacinth and eventually we got a waterlily. Within six months I decided that what I liked most about the pond was the plants I could grow in it. I began designing our next pond. I planned to dig it in early Spring when the weather was still cool, hopefully, and I had several months to plan it. My designs changed a lot over the months, but I a couple of parameters - It had to have room for plants and it couldn't be larger than the flexible pond liner that Billy gave us. After reading and article about pea gravel bogs, I decided that sounded like a really good idea. It would be seperate from the pond, but water would circulate through both and I could get away with using Billy's liner for just the pond and I would get another for the bog. It also allowed me to take a break after digging the pond, before I dug the bog.

I took four days off from work and began deconstructing the old pond. I borrowed a kiddie pool and set it up as a temporary pond and transferred the fish. I pulled the preformed pond out of the ground and dug a bigger hole. Then I laid the liner in the hole, filled it back up and transferred the fish - all in four days! Technically it was a working pond, but I had a lot more to do.

During that first year of having a pond, I learned so much about water quality and biological filtration. I also had a little bad luck with my filter. In hind sight, it was probably too small. During the height of the summer, I was cleaning it more than once a week and once I became more knowledgeable about all of this pond stuff, I realized it didn't have any biological filtration, so I started researching DIY pond filters. The best thing I found was called a "skippy" filter. I'm not sure where the name came from, but it seems to be a great filter. You can build it in any size from a 20 gallon barrel liner, which is what I have, to huge stock tanks that are hundreds of gallons. You start out with the container. a pvc pipe runs down the center and makes a "T" at the bottom. Water will flow through the pipe and to the bottom of the filter, creating cyclonic motion. The rest of the container is filled with nylon pot scrubbers. These have a large surface area for the beneficial bacteria to colonize. As the water flows through the filter, the bacteria pull nutrients from the water, hopefully starving things you don't want like algae. The water flows back into the pond via a spillway, waterfall or pipe, however you have it set up. In my case, it's a waterfall. I've attempted to hide the skippy filter with plants, but I haven't had much success. I'll be doing more landscaping this year, so we'll see.

This has really been a saga. I thought I would post what I've written so far. I should finish the last part in the next few days hopefully, so stay tuned!

Pond Saga, Part 2