Because we were concerned about the goldfish in our first pond eating dragonfly, frog, and toad eggs, we decided to build another pond focusing on the needs of native wildlife. This pond is shallow and has lots of room for marginal plants.
Of course, by the time we created this pond, our goldfish had died, but we were still happy we created this wildlife-centered pond.
We sited it between the house and the sitting area next to the original pond, and along the other direction, between the garage door and the porch path. This was about the only convenient space left for another pond in our small-ish back yard.
People have wondered how we were comfortable putting this pond next to the house BUT 1) this part of our house is built on what had been the original garage so there’s no basement there, and 2) more important, the edge near the house is built up and we have a overflow pipe leading to the driveway so water has never (as I write this in 2020) gotten close to overflowing into the house. I doubt it has even been in the overflow pipe. The only water it regularly gets is rainwater, and sometimes we even need to fill it from our rain barrels.
One interesting aspect of this placement is that the ponds are in alignment, making it seem like the sitting area is on a bridge between the two ponds. And since this pond abuts the house, you might speculate that the house is actually floating on water! (John has already proclaimed that he’s not about to build another pond along the front of the house to complete the illusion, however! Maybe for our 50th anniversary?)
Since most information on designing and creating ponds pertains to merely ornamental ponds, we had a lot less guidance designing this one. We designed as we went along. By the way, there seems to be much more interest in this kind of thing in England, even with special clubs just for dragonfly pond enthusiasts.
Here’s more about how we created this pond.
Mosquitoes
Because we don’t have moving water in this pond, we expected mosquitoes. We originally planned to use mosquito dunks — Bt pellets that kill mosquito larva — probably forever. Each pellet covers up to 100 sq. ft. of surface area and lasts one month, so it’s pretty easy and affordable. We weren’t thrilled about this since unfortunately Bt also kills larvae of the fly family and who knows what else. But because we’re in a urban/suburban area, we felt we needed to take this precaution. (And we also want to enjoy our yard ourselves without getting bit by mosquitoes.)
The first few weeks, this pond did indeed produce mosquito larva as expected. The mosquito dunks worked perfectly, killing the mosquito larva before they turned into adults.
The sign we saw at the Raleigh Museum of Science was correct! After the pond was established, so many creatures that eat mosquitoes and their larvae (birds, frogs, toads, and dragonflies, etc.) live in the pond and in our yard that we haven’t had a mosquito problem since.
In fact, we seem to have fewer mosquitoes than in our pre-habitat garden days. Of course, we still keep an eye out for mosquitoes, and we’ve kept the remaining dunks just in case. But we’re thrilled to find that more than a decade later we still haven’t needed them.
And this page (near the bottom) describes how we implemented Tallamy’s method for preventing mosquitos.
Resources
- Humane Gardener:
Reflection
I’m often asked how we manage our small ponds. The answer is that we don’t, not really—because letting nature take its course supports much more life. Unfortunately, most backyard pond sources base their advice on a different goal: pristine waters that appeal to our culture of excessive neatness but hold little value for wild neighbors.
~ Nancy Lawson, The Humane Gardener
[Referring to popular water feature literature] But the “wildlife” in the illustrations was not what I have in mind for America’s back yards. Our ambition shouldn’t be to accommodate exotic goldfish and tropical water lilies. We should serve the dispossessed: the sipping butterflies, the bathing birds, the laying toads, the overwintering minnows and common newts. I’d want a tamped earth beach for butterflies; a nonslip pebbled bath for birds (graded gently from the shore to four inches deep, as the Audubon Society suggests). Instead of the overhanging coping styled for formal pools and not negotiable by amphibians, I’d provide inclined or stepped-down edges for newts’ and toads’ convenience; and for fish, I’d dig some portion three feet deep at least so they wouldn’t suffocate for lack of oxygen under the ice in winter.
~ Sara Stein, Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards, p. 185