Pond Party

By special request from one of my three followers, this post will feature changes to my pond in recent months. I had been dissatisfied with my pond for a couple of years. One problem with ponds is the appearance of the liner. It looks very unnatural and it isn't easy to disguise it. The liner is typically black and very smooth. If you have a rock edging, the space between the water and the rocks will be visible, and it looks wrong. Below is a photo of what it looked like when first completed. 

You can see the liner and it just makes the whole thing look fake. Also, I used flagstone as the edging and it doesn't look great either.  Later, the plants filled in and it looked better. 

Fast Forward to 2019. I decided to give the pond a makeover. Here's how it looks now.

I removed some of the flagstone and put in boulders. This helped a lot. The next step was to figure out how to disguise the liner. After trying several ideas that didn't work, I hit on a great product. It's a spray foam that is used as a filler and insulation in plumbing and other wet areas. I sprayed it onto the liner to give it some texture. Then I painted it to resemble dirt. Here's a closeup:

 

I think it's a pretty good imitation of a natural earth bank.

About the same time that I was able to get some tadpoles and I put them into the pond. They immediately disappeared. To my surprise, they turned into frogs and now they serenade us every night. The funny thing is that I have never seen them. They are really good at hiding in the daytime. At night if I take one step outside they stop croaking and once again it is impossible to find them.

One of the aquatic plants in the pond is Ludwigia. I'm not sure which species this is. A couple of species are native to California and several are not. Anyway, it produces long runners that stretch out across the pond. It is now putting out some flowers:

A lot of critters use the pond. Raccoons come out at night and wash their food. Birds come around all day to drink, take a bath and eat flying insects. Lately I have seen some tiny water skimmers skating around on the surface. My favorites, though, are the dragonflies. There are the big red ones that have been coming around for more than 20 years and laying eggs every summer. Now I have been seeing a big green one. A few days ago I found this one struggling on the surface of the water.

You can see in this photo that one of its wings is undersized and deformed, and that's why it was struggling. It was unable to fly and it did not survive. Still I hope there will be more of them around.

That's the pond report for today.