Pond

I have two very small ponds in my garden. One is a disused washing up bowl, and the other is an old storage box. These are sufficient to attract frogs and newts!

But such small ponds need maintenance as they are not self-sustaining. Every year, I remove as much water and gunk at the bottom that I can. The gunk includes dead leaves, snails, and occasionally a dead frog. If left, this makes the pond anaerobic (no oxygen) and so a dead pond. I do this in winter, when it's not too cold but hopefully before the frogs start laying frogspawn. I transfer the water to a bucket, get out the gunk on the bottom, and apologise to any frogs or newts in the pond! The gunk is left near-by in case there is anything there that wants to climb back into the pond. I remove floating leaves from the bucket. and tip the top part of the water back into the pond, then refill with water from the tap. The water will be cloudy, but it soon settles down again.

Please note that if frogs use your pond, you must have a brick or two in the corner, to give them something to climb out of the pond. A large frog might manage to get out by itself, but tiny frogs, just developed from tadpoles, can't, and will die if they stay in the water too long.

Several frogs lay frogspawn in the pond. But after a neighbour got rid of a large pond, the frogs moved into mine, and filled the pond with frogspawn! Unfortunately it all died. I am hoping that we get a better balance of frogspawn in future.

A pond needs plants to oxygenate the water. Regrettably duckweed got into mine, and it smoothers the surface during the summer, and has to be constantly removed.

Pond with ice removed

Other pond

Newt

Lots of newts!

Frogs

Cleaning out the pond

Frog and newt objecting to this!

Click on photos for large version.