PondLife – Page 2 – David Bradley

Floral colour schemes in the garden pond

UPDATE: Two bio friends on Facebook came back with two different answers when I posed this question there. Grace Baynes pointed to a paper about genetic changes in stems from the same specimen of Mimulus (monkeyflower) plants here. The keyphrase in the paper “monkeyflowers mutate as they grow”.

Julie Webb posted: tranposable elements and pointed to a paper suggesting that this can occur because of viral infection, here.

I planted up some aquatic plants in #PondLife as regular readers will know. Among them a few Mimulus in a pot. They’re in full bloom right now. Big, buttery yellow horn-shaped flowers with patches of burgundy red and ruddy spots leading into the flower.

Mimulus flower pond — Original mimulus bloom

Now, at some point early in Covid lockdown, I plucked some of the shoots protruding from the basket of Mimulus and planted them in another basket-pot in the pond with some nutrient-depleted aquatic compost (as I had with the initial bunch).

The new shoots took well and one of them bloomed a week or so ago. Same horn-shaped flowers, same colours, but a lot smaller than the make crop.

However, this morning more of the offshoots have bloomed and they have produced similar small flowers but with a very different pattern and colour scheme. Now, if these had been grown from seeds from the original plant I’d have invoked Mendelian genetics to explain the colour variation. But, these offshoots are as the name would suggest shoots off the original plant. They’re genetically identical, they’re not even clones, they’re simply bits of the original plant…

Wilding the garden with Seedball

The lovely people at Seedball sent me a small sack of their products, a great mix of wildflower seeds embedded in clay pellets with natural fertilisers, minerals and chilli (to keep the invertebrates off until germination takes place). I’ve mentioned them before. I did some “wilding last year. This year, I’d planned to scale up, but maybe not quite the completely wilding the garden I’d initially thought about. I’ve previously shared details of the contents of the sack.

Bag clips for the seeds harvested from garden plants and the allotment at the end of last summer

Anyway, I’ve scooped out an additional chunk of lawn on the back garden, turned it over a couple of times, pulled our roots and grass that remained after the digging, did a final rake and then scattered some seeds I’d harvested from Corn Cockle (from a friend via hashtag #AllotmentLife), Yarrow, Rosebay Willow Herb, Purple Toadflax, Wild Fennel, and a couple of others. Raked over that and then scattered a good couple of handfuls of Seedball and watered copiously from the waterbutts.

It doesn’t look too exciting yet. A few other harvested seeds I scattered around the broken up ground under and behind our apple tree next to the almost one-year-old resurrected pond hashtag #pondlife.

Wilding our gardens

In 2019, I reinstated our pond, well, a half-size version of the original that I filled when we moved to this house in the late ’90s with small children. The plants, water snails, and frogs thrived, it seems, the birds love it for a drink too, although, I did find a dead Goldfinch in there one day in the summer (victim of a neighbour’s cat, I think).

I also did some wilding of the gardens, front and back, with various seedlings (from RSPB Hope Farm), some packet seeds, and some Seedballs, which I blogged about at the time. I have masses of seeds collected to use this spring, including ones from some wildflowers that were not there deliberately but sprang up and were very attractive to some moth species.

This year, I am going to work with the good people from Seedball to cover a bigger area of the gardens with wildflowers. They have offered me various mixes and hopefully, there will be plants perfect for shade, some that will pull in the honey crowd (bees), and, of course, some for the Lepidoptera. I am hoping for great things from our garden this year, having ticked more than 300 species of Lepidoptera last year, I think that number might be exceeded quickly the more wildflowers.

The wilding of our gardens will benefit the birds, the amphibia, and the invertebrates species, hopefully, and make our small patch a little haven on the edge of farmland here in South Cambridgeshire.

Pondlife clarity

Our pond has, this week, started to show signs of clarity, we can see the gravel at the bottom now and although it’s not perfectly clear it seems to have achieved some kind of balance at last. That said, it occurred to me after writing the initial draft of this blog post that the thing that did it was transplanting one of the plants into a bigger pot of aquatic soil; that was about a week ago. The low-nutrient aquatic soil has presumably added something to the water or is acting as a filter and led to this new clarification. Of course, what this now means is I need to find a way to camouflage the tubs and the hose you can now see at the bottom of the pond!

There have been sporadic sightings of at least a couple of frogs for a few weeks now. I added some water snails from a friend’s as previously mentioned, and I could actually see them moving around in the newly clear water. I also added a couple more plants including the mimulus in the photo above, maybe that helped with the clarification too.

Damselflies have been investigating again today…which is good…and there is an abundance of mosquito larvae…not so nice.

Pondlife Part VI – Adding more plants

UPDATE: 20 May 2020 – One night later in May saw five frogs roosting around the pond.

UPDATE: 4 May 2020 – Seen and heard two frogs for quite a few weeks after dark. Possibly two males, however, so no spawn. Mimulus in bloom as of ~1 May and a flag iris about to erupt too. The aquatic snails are thriving, we have dozens and dozens of both kinds now.

UPDATE 30 Jun 2019 – A frog made an appearance. Sat on the gravel pot while I went to get a camera and then promptly hopped back in the water on my return.

It’s almost two months since I dug and refilled our resurrected pond. It has a couple of deep oxygenating plants, some reeds, and a margin plant or two. We’ve seen two or three frogs but also lots of mosquitoes and their swimming larvae. There are diving beetles and whirligigs, and similar in the garden. We see an occasional bird having a drink. It’s new, it’s settling.

Macro closeup of a Mimulus flower in the margin of our pond.

The water feature (basically some rocks, a hosepipe and an electric pump in the bottom of the pond) is keeping the pondweed and algae at bay and after several construction attempts makes a nice natural sound now rather than splashing on to the butyl rubber.

Added two new plant species a water lily, Odorate sulphurea, and a Mimulus luteus with the variant name Queen’s Prize. The water lily isn’t much to look at but will hopefully spread its pads and provide summer shade for the submerged amphibia. The Mimulus has lovely blood red and custard yellow flowers. Also, just acquired some Common Water Snails (Limnoea stagnalis) and some Great Ramshorn Snails (Planorbarius corneus) from a friend along with a spiky pond plant, Water Soldier, which are now in place.

The pond surroundings also now have some wildflowers – Red Campion, Foxglove, St John’s Wort, Wild Basil, and others as well as the unkempt and weedy patch of grass behind and plenty of nijer and sunflower seedlings growing from birdfeeder spillage beneath the apple tree. It’s not quite idyllic yet, but it’s getting there…

Using a Foldscope to check for #PondLife

As regular readers will know, I re-dug our old garden pond. Well, it’s just about half the size of the original, which was an oval about 6m long and 3m wide, but it’s finished, sort of, after a lot of hard work in the sun. It’s all terraced and lined and has a few plants and some clean gravel now. It was rained on heavily a few days ago, which should help with the eco-ness, and we have seen our first frog lurking behind a pot containing reeds. The original pond had dozens of frogs and plenty of frog spawn, which was donated and relocated. Might I hope for Great Crested Newts?

I am also keen to know what microscopic life might emerge and whether it needs “seeding” with water from a neighbour’s pond to help things along. In a very timely move, the team at Foldscope have just sent me one of their cardboard microscopes. This device was initially developed to help people in the developing world quickly examine samples of drinking water to ensure the absence of pathogenic creatures in the water. Of course, the applications are much wider than even that grand mission, with the wonderful notion of giving everyone inexpensive access to powerful microscopy, whether educator, student, hobbyist, (citizen) scientist.

The device is all you need, rather than a proper lab, with full-scale microscopes and chemical analysers, to check water quality in that context. It is several layers of carefully engineered card that you slot together (which didn’t take long at all) and then add a bead lens from the kit. Set up your slides and the platform can be adjusted to bring your sample into focus. The spherical microlens has an approximate enlargement factor of 140x.

I have carried out some tests with the sample slides provided with the kit, of a bee’s leg and fern cells and all seems to be working as it should. You can look through the microscope easily enough, but there is a relatively easy way to attach a connector to a mobile phone and then use the foldscope with a slide as the source for the camera, or actually, simply attach a lens to the phone with a spacer and a slide with a spacer and one of the other magnets to keep them in place. Seems to work quite well if you set the phone camera to maximum zoom and rock the slide slightly to bring the object into focus. This is a micro view of a beech tree leaf from our garden.

Next step is to prepare a #PondLife sample.

Two weeks later – #Pondlife Part the Fifth

UPDATE: 22 May 2019 – After another water feature rebuild, I think we have settled on how it shall now stay. The pump in the middle of the pond at its deepest point and I’ve encased the wiring in a piece of hosepipe and peeled back the turf to bury it. It forms an almost invisible seam in the lawn. That edge will in time become overgrown as I’m leaving the grassed area to the side and behind the pond to go wild and hopefully accumulate wildflowers with a little seed assistance.

The water is relatively clear, albeit with a green hue, but no layer of floating pond weeds nor algae, just a few mosquitoes and some of their larvae. I’ve not seen the frog for a day or two.

UPDATE: 19 May 2019 – We rebuilt the water feature and used a longer length of hosepipe to get the pump deeper and into the middle of the pond. During the work, we must have disturbed a new, amphibious resident, Mrs Sciencebase spotted it first, a large-looking Common Frog, Rana temporaria, seemed to have an almost pinkish hue in the greenish water. It’s a good sign of a healthy wildlife pond, we believe.

Well, we’re two weeks into PondLife, no sign of the frogs yet, but plenty of green matter forming a blanket in the bottom of the pond, and some algae on the top. The plants have survived so far, but maybe there are not enough to keep the algae down. A pump is now in situ and a few extra rocks installed to create a nano-Niagara.

The aerating, circulating effect of the pump and, probably more to the point, a bit of skimming of the surface with a sieve seemed to clear the algae, which hadn’t taken too much of a hold.

You can read about the initial work, the redesign, and the plants here:

Beginning – Part 1 – Operation Sciencebase Pond

Lining – Part 2 – PondLife moves on

Restructuring – Part 3 – A new landscape

Planting – Part 4 – Oxygenators and filters

Barred horsetail and more – Part 4 #PondLife

UPDATE: Part 4b Night of 6 MAY 2019, spotted what I think is the first inhabitant of the new pond, a surface-swimming beetle of some kind, perhaps a “diving beetle”.

Having redesigned, realised that the internal shelving of the pond isn’t quite what it should’ve been for the best views…

Anyway, a few plants are in now as is the weird double-handed milk jug we cadged off the blokes at the dump 20 years ago. Plants: barred horsetail, Equisetum japonicum. A tall marginal pond plant, with banded vertical stems. Hydrocotyle var. A pennywort oxygenator. Grows in the muddy margins and shallows of the pond. Scirpus cernuus, more colloquially known as bristle reed is in there too now as is Phragmites variegata, Norfolk reed.

Also in the shallows, an intriguing plant called Juncus effusus, the corkscrew rush. Iris pseudacorus, the yellow water iris, and Primula rosea.

That’s it for now. Full to capacity loaded with a few filtering and oxygenating plants. Needs some more landscaping although that patch at the back is going to be set aside as a micro-meadow, the repotted yucca will probably be relocated, although I’ve also taken 3-4 cuttings from the parent plant the main stem of which was dead.

Oh, we also need to deal with the gravel and mud from the hole…but there’s stuff to do on the allotment before then! None of this is really about aesthetics anyway it’s about creating a nano-ecosystem in our garden for insecta, amphibia, aves, and possibly some mammalia.

Pond Life – Part 3 #PondLife

UPDATE: Another iteration…I think the embankment will go in the morning and the doubled-up liner will be folded beneath the stones rather than cut…for now.

Like I said in the earlier blog about re-digging our old pond, I hadn’t really mapped out the site and how I was going to manage it. We have now decided to use the spare acreage of Butyl liner to double line it…and we are now filling with water. If someone tells me now that that’s not the right thing to do then I’ll just tip the gravel back in the hole and stick the old garden lamp we inherited from previous owners of Pelham Towers on the resulting mound. It’ll be that or the moth trap.

Anyway, while it’s filling, we’re “pondering” what plants to buy to stock it and what rocks to use to edge it. Mrs Sciencebase would like a nano-waterfall of some sort and maybe lights…by the way, the breezeblocks and bricks are history.

An interesting tip from a US site walking you through creating a wildlife pond suggests sampling a few pints of water from a local, established pond and adding that to your own pond water to kickstart an ecosystem. It sounds as pointless as those active, bio yoghurt drinks, to be honest. And, worse, you could introduce parasites and pathogens as well as weeds from another site int your own.

I reckon once you add plants to the pond and a few birds have released copious amounts of uric acid waste into it, it will establish its own system quite quickly. We’ve also got rainwater in butts that might suffice, it’s not stagnant but definitely has some eco going on, Mrs Sciencebase having had the same thought has just checked. So, I reckon a bucket from there would be useful. Indeed, some recommend not using tapwater, but really, it’s going to take quite some time if you let just rainwater fill a pond, and the only chemicals (other than water itself) in tapwater are chlorine products which, soon get used up and the byproducts evaporate.

Meanwhile, as it’s still filling and in between chilling showers, here’s a snapshot from under our Wisteria, seven years, I think since it first blossomed.

Garden Pond Project – Part 2 #PondLife

Having decided to reinstate our garden pond after twenty years, I dug out and shaped the hole, built a mole-size mountain range and then headed to the garden centre to get some Butyl* sheeting and some sharp sand.

The sharp sand was to bed the base of the pond and hopefully reduce the risk of stones piercing the liner. The liner…calculation suggested that I needed about five square metres. Garden centre had a 6m roll, so 5x6m it would have to be and I could trim off the excess. Turned out that even with squashing the sheet down into the hole I pretty much had the same area spare. So, that’s left over. Don’t rely on an online garden centre’s calculator to work out how much you need! Lesson learned…too late.

Any, two bags of sand was just about enough, I’d recommend adding 50% to your estimate for how much you think you’d need. The mole mountain range is now backed by some breeze blocks and bricks and infilled with the gravel. I plan to get some more attractive flat stones to create a dry stone wall on this and the other bricks around the edge.

The sheeting will be cut to a better shape once the pond has water in it…next few days. And, then the edge of the lawn will be trimmed to this shame and the excess sheeting covered with some of the pea shingle that had originally covered our garden when we moved in and was used to backfill the old pond.

Aquatic soil and some aquatic plants to stock the pond as well as the aforementioned drystone wall materials will be purchased soon. Watch this space for further updates.

Butyl, or more formally butyl rubber is a synthetic rubber, a copolymer of isobutylene with isoprene, commonly used for inflatable dinghies and the like as well as pond liners.