Until I sat down on Friday afternoon to watch my three tiny goldfish soar through their watery environment, I'd forgotten how much joy I used to get from the three little ponds I built in my city backyard as a high-school kid.  Yes, while normal people were out doing whatever teenagers do, I was building a resilient pond ecosystem (a success), trying to get moss to grow on concrete (a failure), and making daily sketches of whatever caught my eye.

I flipped back through the sketchbooks this weekend to refresh my memory about what exactly was in that pond ecosystem.  The fish, of course, got top billing.  I tried to add minnows out of a nearby creek, but most died immediately due to low dissolved oxygen levels in the unmoving water, and the last ones froze over the winter.  Koi were beautiful, but really too big for my "mud puddles" (as annoyed siblings were known to call them), and not winter hardy.  On the other hand, I'm pretty sure my feeder goldfish froze solid one winter and came back to life that spring.  They even got big enough to fill the ponds with tiny goldfish fry!

Even though the fish were the most eye-catching, what I wanted to recall were the details about my submerged plants.  I suspect it was my trio of parrot's feather, anacharis, and hornwort that kept oxygen levels high enough for the fish to survive, and also gave them plenty of places to hide.  Hornwort was the most cold hardy and the one I want to add to my current pondlet, but I didn't make any notes in my sketchbooks about where the plants came from.  (I'm pretty sure the other two species came from the pet store, so maybe the hornwort did too?)

Duckweed was another secret ingredient to successful pond culture.  I included two species, one of which came from the aquarium store, was fuzzy on top, and died out eventually.  The other was a good, hardy native that is still present in the remaining pond in my mother's backyard twenty years later.  (Unfortunately, despite internet claims to the contrary, my chickens think hardy duckweed is for losers.  Maybe they would have liked the cultivated species better?)

Of course, there were more photogenic plants too.  I played with just about everything from lilies to flags to forget-me-nots, and most of them slowly petered out when the pond froze through.  Having some emergent plants was handy, though, because it seemed to attract insect life --- damselflies, dragonflies, and water striders all showed up and bred.  Frogs arrived too, one of whom actually sat on a lily pad, to my extreme surprise --- I thought that behavior was only a characteristic of cartoon animals.  I even learned to identify song sparrows when they came to bathe at the pond on warm afternoons.

I'm not sure where the water snails came from, but they were real winners.  I identified them (rightly or wrongly) as tadpole snails, and they laid gelatinous masses of eggs on the submerged plants, creating a host of mini-snails who grew like gangbusters.  The snails kept things clean, and as I discovered one still day, could even slide across the underside of the water surface using water tension, like a water strider in reverse.  (I think these guys have a potential for chicken feed, if we can figure out how to prepare them properly.)

If I had built my guilds perfectly, you'd think the pond would still contain just as much diversity 16.5 years after I graduated and left the aquatic ecosystem to its own devices.  Instead, everything seems to have disappeared except the duckweed (and possibly the tadpole snails).  I mostly blame the decline in biodiversity on the small scale --- it's tough to keep a fifteen-gallon world in balance.

On the bright side, I do seem to have finally managed to grow moss on my laughing Buddha.  Too bad he needs to stand guard over the first generation and can't move to my new digs.  Maybe I'll find a new mascot for my twenty-first century pondlet?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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