Living with a Pond

When we moved in, the goldfish pond was a wreck with about 10 inches of fetid water, mucky with decayed leaves – and who knows what else? – brewing in the bottom. It didn’t bubble like some antediluvian swamp, but it was almost that bad. The wiring for the pump was long missing, the fountain just a broken-off chunk of pipe. We asked the neighbors, and none could remember it operating in at least a quarter century.

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Faced with a total collapse of systems and a complete derelict of a shell, we did the only thing possible: We restored it.

There was no way to siphon out the water with a hose – it was too thick – so we scooped it out using flat-sided plastic trash cans. Reasoning that anything that smelled this funky had to be rich in plant nutrients, we tossed the stinking mess over the side into the nearby garden (although we did bag up the dead cat), then scrubbed down the sides and bottom.

As fish ponds go, this was an old one, built long before scientists invented polyvinyl sheeting for do-it-yourself pond building. It was a raised pond, made of soft Mexican brick to match our house, and some of the bricks were worn and porous.

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We drove out to Lilypons Water Gardens (then in Brookshire, but now long gone) and bought a gooey black tar-like paint that we painted on the interior in an effort to make the brick walls less weepy. After it cured a couple days, we purchased a submersible pump, filter system and a fountain. We hired an electrician to run a new line from the house out to the pond. We filled the pond with water (this took a couple hours) and, wonder be, it all worked. After a month of weekends, we had created a pristine oasis of water leaping and sparkling in the sunshine.

767f42f30150d158e9bf9ac7b0c38b91We probably should have left it at that. As soon as we introduced the water lilies and fish, I realized the pond would never be this clean again. If you have koi, you know they are rooters. That is, they root among the plants. Pond plants are typically planted in plastic tubs that sit on the bottom of the pond. The surface of each tub is covered with gravel through which the plant pushes its way up to the water’s surface. Koi just love to get down there in the gravel and poke around. They can dislodge plants, and they churn up the soil so that it floats away, muddying the water. Koi can make a mess; goldfish are usually much neater.

If you’re thinking of installing a pond, know that a goldfish pond is not no-maintenance. It can be quite a bit of work, depending upon your tolerance for greenish water (which I happen to like) and great bushel baskets of algae. That’s to be expected.

The aggravating maintenance is in repairing the inflictions from the outside world. After restoring the pond, we had our share of the usual pre-adolescent stunts: toilet paper, bubble bath and assorted other stupid stuff deposited in the pond. We regularly hosted strange critters. Once I found a large box turtle in the pond. There’s no way he could have climbed in there himself; someone put him there. With no rocks or tree trunks to climb out on, he might have drowned. I’ve also found wild minnows in the pond – presumably a child’s collection from the local drainage ditch that needed a new home.

People often ask me if we have any problems with cats catching our fish. No. However, if your pond is in the front of your home, as my first one was, you may have problems with neighborhood dogs that like to wade, most especially Labrador retrievers that jump in the pond and whip it up like an eggbeater.

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One year a tropical storm blew in a kingfisher that spent several days sitting on the side of the pond and in the nearby trees, helping himself to our sushi buffet. Just when he had nearly cleaned us out of fish, I bought a net – the kind used in orchards on fruit trees – and covered the pond. The bird finally grew discouraged and moved on.

During the early years of pond ownership, I liked to take my cocktail out there in the evening and sit on the edge and feed the fish. Some of the big koi became so tame, they would swim into my cupped hand and allow themselves to be stroked. A few years later, we built a brick wall bisecting our front property to create a courtyard in the front garden. The wall cut us off from the pond, which was on the street side of the wall. The consequence was I spent far less time out there, and most of the fish reverted to being almost feral.

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But if we didn’t socialize with the fish as we once did, others did. Nearly every Saturday, some family on bikes would make a U-turn to come back and look at the pond. Kids in strollers pushed by their nannies brought baggies of bread crumbs to feed the fish. (When I noticed, I hurried out to give them fish pellets instead, white bread being no better for fish than for you and me.) Once a group of women and their toddlers sat out there half the afternoon talking and eating. Alas, when they departed, they left me a used disposable diaper.

But here’s a memory that sort of makes it all worthwhile: One Sunday morning we heard the low rough sound of a large car engine, not one of ours, idling in the driveway on the other side of the courtyard wall. When I went to take a look, I found a Mexican family, all dressed in their Sunday finest, posing on the pond and taking pictures. I guessed that the man worked on one of the lawn or construction crews that service the street and thought the pond would make a lovely setting for a family portrait. I just waved hello and went back inside, smiling to myself that someone else found the pond as enchanting as I did.