Fair Is Foul And Foul Is Fair

Spent the morning amidst the primal ooze at the bottom of the pond.  You've got to be madly in love with a pond to go through the spring cleaning it requires.  It's kind of like changing a baby's diapers:  foul, but you do it because the end result is fair.

In the pond's case, the fairness will happen in a couple of weeks, when the lily pads rise to the surface of the water. Then the frogs will migrate in from the woods and we'll have music as well as circus acts throughout the day.

But in the meantime, ugh!  Although my job is made more tolerable by a pair of gloves that my daughter gave me--thick rubber with a soft cotton lining, and they reach all the way up to my shoulders--mucking out the pond is utterly gross.

On pond-cleaning day my husband sets up a siphon with a hose, which sucks up the water very slowly.  Meanwhile, I kneel at the edge of the pond and with a racket-type contraption scoop up as much stinky gunk as I can reach.  Then I shake the gunk into a bucket and deposit it on the vegetable beds (waste not, want not).

Today's bottom-of-the-pond take consisted of a million leaves from the ash tree across the yard;  two dead fish;  about a thousand drowned earth worms and a couple of live ones (why hadn't they drowned?); the long, gelatinous remains of many water lily stems;  and five extremely wiggly salamanders--or one salamander that got scooped up five times.

The scooping usually goes on for three hours or so, by which time the siphon starts clogging up and I'm exhausted, my knees hurt from kneeling on stone,  and I figure that a 50%  water change should suffice to keep the pond ecology going for another year.

While the pond fills with nice clean water from the hose, I take another look at the vegetables with their side dressing of pond gunk and think about all that fairness-yielding foulness, all that death leading to new life. When you live close to the earth, after a while those fair/foul distinctions start to fade.  I picture how much good that black slime is doing to my broccoli, and the smell doesn't seem so bad.

 

Of Frog And Pond

I had to spring-clean the little patio pond today.  Normally I aim for a sunny day after the ice has melted but before the frogs come loudly back to life.  But because of this apocalyptic weather, frog-song erupted on the patio two nights ago, about the same time the peepers started yelling in the big pond way down in the woods.  Our pair of pond frogs have clearly been doing more than singing, since this morning there was a substantial mass of frog eggs floating on the water.

At last year's spring cleaning, there were a number of frog cadavers to dispose of (my frog funerals consist of flipping the rubbery bodies over the fence into the chicken yard, for the hens to feast on).  I didn't want this year's tadpoles to hatch in water polluted by their relatives' remains.  Before things went any farther, I figured I should partially drain the pond, get the worst of the muck and the winter's frog casualties out of the bottom, fertilize the water lilies, and refill the pond with clean, cold well water for the tadpoles to grow in. 

When we built the pond, we made sure that one end of it was 3 1/2 feet deep.  This is supposed to be below the frost line, and to ensure that hibernating critters don't get killed by the encroaching ice.  After  last year's tragic spring, I learned that even if there is water below the ice, unless gases have a way to escape, frogs and salamanders and fish will suffocate.  The only way to prevent this is to keep an opening in the ice by electrical means, and since we don't (yet) have an outlet on the back wall of the house, despite the mild winter, the pond was solidly frozen for months.

I was expecting quite a frog holocaust today.  There had been dozens of frogs in the pond last summer.  In the fall, before the pond iced over, three or four of them had died, floated to the surface, and been skimmed off and fed to the hens.  Today, however, when my spouse-installed siphon started to lower the water level, a lot of dead leaves surfaced, and quite a few dead caterpillars, but not a single dead frog.

The two live frogs, alarmed by the receding waters, clung to the lily pots, their eyes popping with alarm.  I had previously scooped the mass of spawn into a bucket and put it out of harm's way in the shade.  As I skimmed the year's detritus, I brought up one very lively tadpole and three salamanders (two of whom were in flagrante).  When the water level got quite low I also saw, swimming in the murky depths...a fish!

I have documented in these pages my sad attempts to introduce fish into the pond.  For two summers I have decanted, first, shubunkin (the Japanese gold fish that look like koi), and then, when these perished, plain gold "feeder" fish into the pond.  Every single one--or so I thought--floated up or disappeared, victims of my pond's unsatisfactory ecology.  And yet today here was a fish, not gold but mud-colored, and definitely alive.  Had it dropped from the sky?  Had it emerged by spontaneous generation from the bottom muck?  Was it one of the originals that had somehow survived?  Was it a mirage spawned by my fevered brain?

When the pond was about a third empty, I started pouring in clean water from the hose, and decanted the frog spawn into it.  Both the mass of eggs and their parents disappeared into the depths.  As the pond filled and I installed the solar-powered fountain and bubbler, then poured in the barley straw pellets and the rotten-egg-scented solution intended to keep the water from turning into a fetid jelly, there was no sign of life on the surface.  I wondered if I by insisting on this belated cleaning I had murdered my pond pets.

But as soon as the sun went down somebody on the patio started playing the amphibian castanets with gusto again, and I feel reassured.  If we don't get a blizzard in the next few days, the frogs, the salamanders,  that ghostly fish and I will probably be o.k.

In Which I Wade In the Water

Do you know the Honey In The Rock rendition of the spiritual:

"Wade in the water,
Wade in the water,
Wade in the water, children
My God's gonna trouble the water..."?

Today, sunny and bright before a spate of rainy days, was my chance to deal with the garden pond.  All the advice about ponds maintains that, to keep algae at a minimum, you must cover the surface of the water with at least 40% plants.  Right after the pond was built last summer, I went to the nearest nursery and bought six pots of aquatic plants:  two water lilies, one miniature cattail, and three others whose names I forget.

When I got home, I took one dripping pot out of its plastic bag and dropped it slowly onto the submerged shelf that runs around the perimeter of the pond.  Imagine my shock when the pot, after spewing a large amount of dirt into the water, wavered off and sank into the murky depths.  Before submerging the next pot, I gathered some pieces of slate and put them on top of the dirt, then lowered the pot into the water.  The slate floated away and the pot sank, but not before shedding half its cargo of dirt into the H2O.
 
This depressing scenario continued until I ran out of plants and rushed into the house in despair, buried my nose in a book, and tried to forget the whole thing.

Now here it was spring again, and the pond was full of algae, and I needed plants to cover the surface if I was ever to have the hope of fish in there and water that looked merely like broth instead of pea soup.  Plus, aquatic plants are expensive.  So I knew I had to retrieve my six pots from the depths.

This morning, my husband rigged up a syphon system with hoses, then left for other pursuits.  While the water level lowered ever so slowly, I got my newly-purchased supplies ready.  I soaked a special aquatic planting medium in water, and set out six nylon mesh planting bags.  I also skimmed off the leaf debris that surfaced as the water went down.  There was an entire autumn's worth of leaves in that pond, as well as some dead salamanders, half a dozen drowned earthworms, and several frog skeletons. 

At one point, the tips of the rotted spears of the cattail became visible.  I gave them a tug, and the entire pot came up...along with a powerful stench of decay.  But when I upended the pot, there were white, turgid shoots emerging from the rotten mess.  I trimmed off the slimy bits, placed the plant in one of the nylon planting bags, filled it in with the planting medium, which consisted of hard clay pellets, and lowered it into the pond.

I held my breath.  Would the bag and its contents float away?  Would the planting medium drift off into the water?  Not a bit.  The wet clay weighed everything down, and the planting bag and its contents settled exactly where I placed it.

There remained five plants to retrieve and repot.  I checked the far end of the syphon hose and saw that it was vomiting dead salamanders and the outflow was growing slower.  I stared at that stinking green soup, hoping that somehow the pots would surface, or I could reach them and somehow avoid having to go in.

I kept skimming off rotten leaves and a frog cadavers and flinging them onto the grass.  You'll know how foul the smell was when I tell you that the dogs, all three of them, not only ate the stuff, but rolled in it ecstatically.
Finally, the words of the spiritual came to me, "you got to wade/in de waater/waaade/in de waaaater..."
So I did, removing glasses and relevant clothing first, terrified that I would slip and dive headlong into the murk.

All I can say is, ugh.

I was grateful for my prehensile toes, which allowed me to locate and lift the pots out of the depths and thus avoid immersing my upper body.  But still, ugh!  At one point, a large dead frog floated up.  I should have picked it up and saved it for the chickens, but my heart failed me, and I let it sink back down.  When I crawled out of the primeval slime, my feet left green prints on the patio slate.  I hosed myself down and repotted the plants.

There was only one live frog in the pond.  I suspect that the dozens that inhabited it last fall died of asphyxiation when the ice closed in.  Next winter, we'll put in a de-icer to keep the pond denizens alive.

Tuesday the two shubunkin fish I ordered will arrive.