Inside this edition: How to improve your backyard with a pond.
Hey y’all! It’s me again – your girl Rainey here to share with YOU – my tribe – The Rainey Crew. In late Spring of 2017, after a very heavy rainfall our backyard collapsed. No exaggeration. The fence and a third of the soil fell into a drainage canal behind the fence. Of course, it was a hit to our wallet to have the retaining wall and fence rebuilt. You must be wondering what that has to do with a pond in the back yard. Well, in our infinite wisdom since the backhoe was on-site we asked the men to dig a hole about four feet deep with a circumference of 10 feet. This was all included in the price of repairing our retaining wall and fence of course, so that was a win for our backs. Now we were on course to instantly improve our backyard with a pond.
The Ugly Reality
My husband, at every free opportunity worked on that pond. After work, using all the daylight available, every weekend, researching online on what to do, and best practices. I give all credit to him and our now beautiful backyard pond. However, it was not all good times in the process of doing it on our own. This was not an HGTV show where it was all done in one hour. We are talking months. The costs for materials like the liner, sand and rocks for the landscaping were carefully budgeted as well, because this was not in our yearly budget of expenses. Even though it was a long time having a brown hole in the backyard It was one of our best carried out projects to date.
Best Natural Bug Repellent
Fast forward eight months, and we had a great looking pond with eight Pond Comets to make sure we don’t breed mosquitoes for the neighborhood. We also added lilies, lotus plants, and other water foliage. These plants are only to give the fish shade in the summer. Before our pond, the backyard was okay, and I mean just okay.
We had a lawn and a nice sized patio where we would use our fire pit. However, the backyard became pretty much unusable once late Spring and Summer set in. If it wasn’t the mosquitoes, it was the gnats, and any other type of buggy annoyance native to our region. With the introduction of water into the environment it prompted a variety of small birds to breed and hang out in our yard. There is nothing more birds love more than bugs and taking baths when it gets too warm. The best result is a bug free yard.
Bad Build up of Algae
Unfortunately, what comes with the rebirth of Spring comes at least a hundred new pond comets from the original eight. Our backyard also faces South and we have no trees. As the sun returns for the Spring and Summer months we now find ourselves with an algae problem. Stringy, green, slimy algae. Now, our large water feature was a mass of green pea soup that we could barely see our fish through. We did expect this, but not to this degree. There are a lot of cures out there to help with algae in ponds.
The remedies we tried included but not limited to barley pods – (never worked), and adding more plants directly to the pond (nope). If you go out on the internet you will find treatments that are priced proportionately to the size of your pond anywhere from $37.00 to $225.00+ every couple of months, because algae hath no master and will return.
There are also ultra-violet (UV) clarifiers you can use to keep your ponds clear. The worst and most expensive remedy is to pay a service to apply the treatments to keep your pond clear and beautiful.
The Beauty of the Bog
Now, you will soon get to know that my husband is not one to take the easy route to a solution, and he recognized the issue at hand. With the power of the internet he discovered the ultimate cure to an algae-ridden pond with only start-up costs needed. Enter the bog filter. If you have any plans, thoughts, or conceptions of building a pond to improve your backyard with an area of 100 square feet or more with fish; do not build it unless you have room for a bog filter to go with it.
A bog filter is a biological filter – no chemicals ever. A bog in nature is a wetland where the water is at the ground surface, and generally has a variety of plants which thrive in it . A filter is a system to remove impurities. Once he completed the calculations to determine what size the bog filter should be in relation to the size of the pond the work began. He dug the hole (on his own this time) adjacent to the pond. He purchased PVC piping from the Home Depot, another pump, sand, gravel, and finally plants that do well in bogs (not any old plant will do).
Good Bog Plants are the Secret
There is much more to the logistics of building it which I will skim past in the interest of time and boredom. The basic principle of the bog filter is that the second pump which we put in the pond acts as a siphon. It sucks out the water, fish poop, any algae created, and that goes through to the bog filter. It travels through the pipes, and the gravel, and then cycles right back into the pond. The magic happens with the plants.
The plants are sitting in the shallow water of the bog, and they absorb the nutrients/ fish poop. This is normally the fodder for algae growth along with sunshine. The once tiny plants within ten days to two weeks started making an impact. By the end of the summer our gravelly bog was lush, overgrown, and our pond was so clear it looked like you could drink out of it.
The Best Retreat
When you improve your backyard you expect to create a calming, enjoyable space, complete with pond, and waterfall. However, we also created an eco-system which was never there before. I mentioned the new birds, so we added more bird houses. There were more butterflies, so we added more flowers, and dragonflies were a result of the pond. We live in the suburbs, but the way things were going you would swear we lived in the woods with no neighbors for miles around. Improving your backyard comes at a cost.
The Worst Retreat
The first visitor in the summer whom we had never seen before in our backyard pre-bog filter was the racoon. He was an adventurous bastard who tried to catch our fish for his dinner. Plants in the pond were knocked over in his efforts. As far as we could tell he did not have much success, unfortunately he did scare the crap out of the fish. Within, the next two days I purchased a net to cover the pond, and installed a motion sensor LED light. Our next visitor came in the winter after we took the net off to clean the pond but did not put it back on. Hello heron! The heron made out like a bandit and may have gotten a couple of my fish. Again, the problem was quickly rectified with the return of the net and our dog making her presence known.
The Neighborhood Nature Preserve?
By the way is someone missing their cat. In my neighborhood, someone either has a very large house cat or there was a bobcat sitting at the edge of our pond – again admiring our fish. The latest visitor is an owl, and dare I say not a small owl by any means. This is the craziest visitor by far because we saw the owl actually sitting on the frozen pond – et tu Brutus admiring my fish. When it saw our movements at the door it flew off the pond and onto the fence. Will it return? I am torn on if I want it to return to our backyard sanctuary.
Improved Backyard?
When we created this riparian space we really expected, the small song birds, the dragonflies, and as a result a vast reduction in mosquitoes and gnats. It is incredible how the totally enclosed pond has improved the backyard, and is now a haven for wildlife that you normally find at a State Park.
My husband is a photographer so on one hand he captured some great wildlife shots all because of the pond. However if the fauna starts to recognize that our backyard is the next Wild Kingdom, I am not sure if I am totally on board with that. Granted it did take a lot of manual labor to pull this together, but it was so worth it to improve the backyard. It has given us so much more to look forward each day besides bugs and grass.