Build it and they will come

Since we moved into our new home three years ago, we've been contemplating adding a water feature to our back yard.  But we soon found out that digging through rocks and roots was a challenge we weren't up to.  Other factors like lots of children running through the yard and having to hook up an electrical line to run a filter made us think twice about constructing a pond.

A compromise was in order.  After considering container water gardens, we thought why not do the same thing but with a small pond form?

Lowes had just the thing - a fifty gallon preformed kidney-shaped pond liner.  Add a few plants - some water hyacinth, a hardy lily and some pickerel weed -  and voila a beautiful low maintenance water feature.  But would it attract the wildlife we were hoping for?

At first, we got a load of mosquitos.  A couple of attempts to add small fish to eat the larvae failed.  Then, our luck changed.

In mid-July, my son came home with two green frogs he'd rescued from our neighbor's pool.  Into the pond they went.  Luckily, they decided to stay.  When we returned from a week's vacation, our two-frog pond had become a five frog pond.  Goodbye mosquitos. 

These little frogs have staked out territories.  There's the lily pad frog, the pickerel frog, and the rock frog.

We were quite overzealous with our plant purchase, so we decided to add a whisky barrel water garden alongside the pond.

This container houses water lettuce and a fun and funky dwarf papyrus.  It's addictive!