The Pond

One of the selling points of our house was the pond in the back yard. When I say pond, at that time it was more of a former pond, or potential pond or "seasonal" pond. Fed by three small streams, the pond had been neglected for so many years that it was largely filled in with silt and overrun with cattails. As soon as it became physically possible after the snows melted, I dug up all the cattails and dredged by hand much of the pond to a shallow depth. This was in vain as the cattails grew back threefold.

I retained Jerry the lawn guy and his brother in law to help me realize my vision of the pond. Meanwhile, Jasper the pit bull used it as a wallow and did his best hippo impression. We ordered a liner, and Jerry and in-law dredged the pond. As is the way with contractors, Jerry and in-law made themselves scarce for 8 weeks or more until the rains came back and the pond filled back up with water. We had a large mud hole in the yard, an attractive nuisance for Jasper.We fired the contractors and retained 5 day laborers through a temp agency and installed the 60x60 liner ourselves by submerging it at the point where the streams entered the pond. The weight of the water and my stomping around secured the liner to the ground.

Ellen and I spent all of September and October mining stones from the mountain and bringing them down by the wheelbarrow full. On a good weekend, we could mine 600 stones and place them around the edge of the pond to secure and conceal the liner. Ellen hated this intensive labor but kept a photo diary of the progress of the pond. We cut away the excess liner and created some planting beds and gravel walkways along the edge of the pond. Despite all this manipulation, the frogs and crawdads endured.

The winter was long and harsh, and the pond was frozen and hidden from view by snow for most of the season. The melt and intense Spring storms saw some flooding, well contained in the pond, but destructive. A day of additional stonework (I bought two pallets of river jacks) and gravel work left the border in good repair. Quite a bit of silt and rotted leaves are in the pond, and I will pull most of this out this weekend. I will leave some for lilies and the wildlife. There are thousands of frog eggs and dozens of adult frogs already, and daffodils that I thought had been dredged up have bloomed. Some hardy lilies that I put in the pond last fall had disappeared, but they seem to be sprouting up through the silt.

Last weekend we did some planting of bleeding hearts and the like and lots of flower seeds. We will see what comes up. The nearby wildflower bed looks as if the flowers will volunteer to return. Both the parsley and the turnips in the garden volunteered.

UPDATE: Ellen reminded me that all the rock mining and moving was performed with a wheelbarrow with a flat tire. I would swear that I was going to get a bicycle pump and inflate it but would always forget this as soon as I was not using the wheelbarrow. This year, the tire is inflated, and it is amazing how much less work is involved in pushing a load of rocks.