Another Dream Come True!

[Sidebar: I created this  "Aquatic Gardening" label for posts years ago when we started using real plants in our fish tank...husband showed me  Dutch aquascaping  and oh boy was I in! 

Sadly ours never quite took off like the pictures on Google, but the plants did thrive for awhile before getting overgrown, then scraggly.  We decommissioned the tank when our last fish died shortly before our second kid was born...seemed like good timing to take a break, though it's still sad to me. But another dream has been resurrected!!]

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I look at ponds and dream. 
Imagine...fish and frogs and dragonflies and a peaceful waterfall and lilies and....!!

But we have entirely too many tree roots to dig out a pond. (I can barely get quart pot sized plants in sometimes!)

And we have small children drawn to all things water like addicts. And worst of all - neighborhood cats that are allowed to roam 😑😑 Fish are definitely out of the question.

But, (once again, thank you internet that is occasionally helpful!) I started seeing container ponds 🤯

A dream may not be dead yet!

I went to Costco and got me one of them giant $18 plastic pots 😁😁

A year ago 🫣🫣

But finally as I started creating my  rain garden, one of the first things I did was create a level spot, put a giant paver I had gotten for free as the base and proudly stick my empty pot awaiting its glorious future!

There it sat empty for weeks as I worked around it creating the bed. Except by "empty" I mean not... 3 year-old kept it well-stocked with her mucky mud kitchen "sink" water, dumping dirt and leaves in "to feed the frwogs", and then added two spoons as "potties for the frwogs to use".
What more could a frog possibly need?!

So there I was at the nursery in mid-May, looking for the last few plants I needed in the rain garden. I started chatting with one of the workers and offhand asked about pond plants since I was still in the middle of researching what the heck I needed for this thing. 

Next thing I know he's explained the wonders of "normal" plants like cardinal flowers, calla lilies and blue-eyed grass being wonderful pond plants! What?!! 

Aaaaand next thing I know I've purchased a floating planter, some blue-eyed grass, and a very expensive (and not fully native 🙄) water lily (Nymphaea 'Albatross').

I went home and started on my impromptu project! Doing research on my phone as I went. Highly not ideal. Especially when I discovered I would need pea gravel to keep the dirt from contaminating the water. [siiiiigh] Break for lunch and then off to Lowe's the kid and I trotted for the gravel so I could plant the lily in the bottom and a cardinal flower I divided from a cluster in my yard went into a pot I would raise up as the water was able to be filled. 

Ta daaaaa!!!! It's started!

While pondering how to build it up under the stones to give the frogs a place to get out, I realized one of the ugly curved edgers I'd gotten for free (took it as a favor since I needed all the other stuff they had and figured I'd just take this to the dump at some point with a load) would work perfectly!

Eventually it'll be submerged, but I couldn't fill the water higher than 6-8" above the sad little water lily.

That very afternoon, who should we find up on the deck, but......

Squeeeeee!!!!

Two other times we've found him up on the deck this spring! He's either a gray tree frog or Cope's gray tree frog (they're apparently virtually identical and very hard to tell apart).

Unfortunately I couldn't move him to the pond because my water was still dechlorinating! Arg!

That's something I now have to think about! For example, while sprinkling the gardens around the pond, how do I keep the chlorinated water out of the pond?!

Genius!

Pond in place, I just needed to find a couple of other plants, but meanwhile I waited, not seeing the frog for a few weeks. (And crossed my fingers that my sad-looking sunken water lily would survive 😬😬)

At one point I saw little squiggly guys...wait, those aren't tadpoles are they?!

Sir Google informed me they were in fact mosquito wrigglers....yikes!!! In went the BTI bits and thankful the wrigglers were "addressed" the next day.

This entire time I've been harassing a very gracious friend who started his small pond last year and is a wealth of useful information. 

Not only information, but he shared some of his water lettuce! His wife brought 3 of them when I had her over that week. 

Ten days later and they had quadrupled! Goooood gracious.

Aaaaand, a water lily leaf reached the surface!!! That sad looking, stupidly expensive plant isn't dead!

Looking so pretty!!

However I realized that the floater I had bought was entirely too large for the pond, so that money's down the drain (at least until I make myself a larger pond...shh, don't tell husband...maybe  he won't even notice  👀👀). I repotted the blue-eyed grass and hung it off the side...perfect!

Blue-eyed grass blooming! New water lily leaves reaching the surface every day!

Waiting....waiting....watching.....

And then!

One night in mid-June I heard him! 

I ran downstairs to get a video of his trills.

I excitedly texted my pond buddies and went to bed a very happy gardener.

All was dark and quiet...except for my screeching friend.............and my dear husband: "What have you done?"

😶😶😶

Hindsight - perhaps I shouldn't have put the pond right below our bedroom window. (Popped in the earplugs and dozed off wonderfully.)

🤭🤭🤭

It's so pretty, though!!

The water got so clear and lovely and you can see the lily leaves growing down there!

It was really fascinating to watch things start growing - even the algae is fascinating! (I needed to get another oxygenator plant to help curb that from taking over.)

Waiting....waiting....watching.....

And then!

Two nights after hearing him, I found something under the deck while I was putting my couch cover back on - so glad I didn't step on it because when I leaned down closer, sure enough it wasn't a leaf!!

I scooped him up and headed off to the pond! (Hindsight...sure most people scooped up frogs as a kid, but now that I know how absorbent their skin is, doing that really could be dangerous to the poor little guy!)

He dove in out of my hands and I panicked that I'd drowned him! (Tree frogs lay their eggs in water, but don't live in it...I wasn't sure how strong of swimmers they are! All the instructions say to make sure they have ledges and good ways to climb out of the water since they're not really swimmers.) I ran inside, ran to the other door to turn on the light over the pond, ran out and found him clinging for his life! Poor guy! (It probably wasn't that dramatic, but anthropomorphism comes with the territory.) 

I put him on the rocks and left him in peace. He was gone when I checked half an hour later.

We went away for a long weekend and when we came back there were several new lily leaves and something on them. Sir Google Lens suggested some kind of lily aphid and suggested dumping them into the water for free fish food. 

Well I don't have fish, so I left them be.

There were also what looked like tiny bean sprouts starting deeper below - so fascinating to see what life is forming!

The next day the little "aphids" were gone! How odd. Wonder what ate them?

As I was peering into the pond I see...

🤯🤯🤯🤯

Are those what I think they are?!!

Sir Google once again (this time accurately) and friends confirmed! 

I HAVE BABIES!!!

The individual "bean sprouts" I could see starting a bit down in the water were quite obvious when they clustered together at the surface!

I am in awe! One month after creating this and already it's serving its purpose!! Everyone in my gardening group and chat feeds I've read say "If you build it, they WILL come", but I know absolutely nothing...my plants are hardly growing! How could I possibly get frogs that fast?!

The next morning we went to check on the eggs and they were gone! Oh dear, what ate them?

Wait....what's moving in the water?!

BABY TADPOLES!!!

They had already hatched!

Needless to say I'm beyond excited and can't wait to watch them develop! (Here's hoping any survive and that the neighborhood cats don't play fish [amphibians] in a barrel 😳)

I bought a Brazilian pennywort* at the local aquatic store; it's an oxygenator so that the "pond scum"** I'm creating doesn't get out of control. (Tadpoles do need a LOT of algae to eat! They don't become carnivorous until they mature into frogs.)

*You can see it in the top right corner under the surface where it will stay. I was really hoping for natives, but I'm starting with what I can find and need to research how crazy some of them will get quickly inside this tiny of a container.

**husband's term...he's not wrong...though I prefer "aquatic habitat" 

I was also informed by a very knowledgeable worker at the nursery that if I plant a calla lily in the bottom of the pot, it should overwinter....? 🤞
(You can just barely see it's pointed leaves peeking out under the pennywort...probably planted them too close, but it's a small pot!)

And with that I was finally able to fill the pot all the way up!

Every day I go out and check and the tadpoles are chunkier! (There are so many! Though how they're not boiling when the water feels warm to my skin and it's only getting hotter [over 100°] this week, I don't know! 😬 But it's cool down at the bottom and yet they are hanging out at the top every time I check on them, so must be fine. 🤷

Sooooo pretty!!!

Postscript...

On 4th of July after a giant storm rolled through, we went out front to do sparklers; husband came from the back yard and showed me this picture:

Squeeeee!!!

I've never seen one IN the pond! (Besides when I placed it there and he wasn't thrilled 😂)

AND a second one!!! More eggs coming out way! 😆 (Apparently they can mate and lay eggs all the way through August! This pot may get veeeery crowded! 😬)

This is SO much fun!!

THE Rain Garden

 I planted a lovely little "fake rain garden" in the corner of my yard where everything drains to. It doesn't exactly meet true rain garden criteria - more like just dig a very shallow basin, put plants down there that like more water and call it good.

But where the downspout comes out.... 💡💡

Texted a friend "the red is where I need to remove the grass immediately" (needed to get out the invasive groundcover that asserted itself in this spot far from where I ever planted it) "and had an inspiration - maybe the yellow could be where I put a rain garden!"

Oh ye small-minded peasant...think larger, my friend! Reach for the stars! 🤭

Started taking out said invasive ground cover (loved my mazus reptans, but didn't know it would leap to other parts of the yard and start taking over! I've come to love native violets even more) last fall...

Then I moved the woodchips from the  tree bed  I created to start killing grass for the rain garden!

In the spring I measured everything out and did my perc test. It basically failed, but I won't let that stop me 🙈 (other times it's showed great signs of draining and at this point we're in such a drought that I won't have problems for awhile)

I obtained a ton of pavers and blocks for free off Marketplace, so that became the perfect thing for creating a clean edge to the beds that husband can mow over without having to string trim edging around so much so often.

Have I mentioned how much I hate seating paving stones?! Only had to shift and move and re-plan 4 different times, but hey, wouldn't be a landscaping project without such fun, right?!

Time for the other least favorite project...removing sod! 😬
Then remove the mulch and dig the basin!

I can't dig the basin too deep because it will compromise the integrity of the existing retaining wall for the berry bed. So instead, to get a basically flat-bottomed basin, I had to build up the lower end quite a bit because of the yard slope. Not ideal, but so thankful for those mini retaining stones I got for free to help!  

I played with the layout of the stepping stones quite a bit, also changing my mind a few times.

Because I didn't want to build it up too excessively (I was squeaking by just barely with the extra dirt I had laying around as it was), the garden ended up being smaller than it should be for that quantity of water coming off the roof. But then I had the idea to make it tiered! So I built the lower portion that the upper portion can "spill over" into if needed (I also channeled water from the stepping stone path to run down into it.) I am super happy with how the stepping stone path turned out!! I divided a big creeping phlox I had there to try and start the filling-in-around-the-stones process.
(Unfortunately I need more small retaining wall blocks and the small ones are apparently nonexistent at the big box stores, so I'll need to keep looking. Right now there are bricks there temporarily wedged into the dirt, but too many impressive rains [see below] and I have a feeling they will not be up for the task!)

I was miffed to find the day I had to do all this finalizing, it unexpectedly sprinkled / light rained all morning. Oh well - Dad's coming in tonight so we can buy plants and plant tomorrow - I need this done! 

Turns out it was a wonderful blessing in disguise! I was able to see how the rain garden actually performed without plants - where the low and high spots were!

I was able to level it out a bit better and then popped in some wild bergamot (also known as purple bee's balm - Monarda fistulosa), black-eyed susans, and a volunteer cardinal flower I found near the bed. Moved a couple things around and added extras from elsewhere like astilbe and spiderwort. Then started filling in and around the berm with violets and my lyreleaf sage that has propagated itself beautifully this year! And happy, happy - planted the shrubby St. John's Wort (Hypericum prolificum) I've had growing in a pot waiting for this lovely bed!

Ready and waiting! 

In the morning we headed to the lovely native garden where I got everything except straight species switchgrass and cardinal flowers.

By the time we got back and had lunch, we had like an hour and a half before school pick-up, but man we moved! 

Incredible!!!

When we got back, we finished up filling in with violets and black-eyed susans and ta da! Gorgeous!!

All that was missing was switchgrass which was on order at the nursery. (Turns out I had enough cardinal flowers to divide and plant what I needed without having to buy any! I also highly suspect my swamp mallow/hardy hibiscus seeds won't take off...especially after the next day described below, so I'll probably just need to buy one of those at some point.) 

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So there we are getting ready for bed the next night and DOWNPOUR! 

Within minutes the whole garden was a pool! Welp - talk about trial by fire! I envisioned mulch floating away, berms blasting out, and having to chase down bedraggled babies throughout the yard and replanting! 😱

But an inspection the next day showed it was perfect!! Maybe a bit of mulch displaced in a couple areas, but otherwise, nothing was amiss!! In fact everything looked even perkier than when they'd all flopped after planting!

I'm super excited I got another 'Red Sprite' winterberry in there! Realized I had room for a shrub, so long as it wouldn't get enormous and in my research discovered winterberries love water and are good for rain gardens! I already have the male for my other three Red Sprites, so I'm good to go! (The native nursery had them! And it was $45 less than when I'd had to special order that specific species from another nursery years ago! [Most other winterberry varieties grow too big and I didn't want them covering the shed window, so pigeon-holed myself into this kind.])  

My Switchgrass came in and woo hoo, other than probably needing to buy a swamp mallow next year, it's done!

The Before...

The After...

Wait, what about that giant, [formerly empty in previous pictures] pot?

Stay tuned as we introduce a new category: 

Aquatic Gardening!!

My Raised Bed Dreams Come True!

Oh the front beds. 

Started a year after we moved in when I knew 0.13 things about gardening, and so it has been over a decade of trial and error.

Part of the trickiness is two-fold:

1) North-Northwest facing, most of the beds are shaded by the house until about 2-3pm when they then get blasted with afternoon sun. 

2) Above them are two cantilevers (split-foyer overhang plus roof overhang) that equal FIVE FEET of coverage...a.k.a. a nightmare for rain watering.

Take a moment for patting on the back since that is what it looked like when we toured the house...so ANYTHING has got to be an improvement! 

We cleared out the 3' tall maple saplings and it sat sadly empty for a year.

After a year spent renovating our foreclosure inside, we decided to make beautiful beds out in the front. 

So I designed it and researched plants and learned about the benefits of natives and learned about their sun and water needs before knowing if they are right for this spot.....10 years after planting these beds. (See the name of my blog?! I never claimed to have learned anything except the hard way!)

So what we ACTUALLY did was to just show up at the nursery and go "this looks cool" "ooh, let's get one of those".

Well, as I mentioned it was so much trial and error. Many of the plants didn't survive...I am just not a good water-er! 

And didn't realize until much later how little sun they got. Nor how much more babysitting non-natives take.

It had some prettiness going for it, but mostly just looked like a chronic mess. Especially when the  photinia x fraseri died, I knew it was time for an overhaul.

For years I've known that for it to look really great and to actually work without constant watering, we needed raised beds since the right side was quite sloped to the driveway.

But ouch on the wallet! 

In the fall of 2024 I grabbed some end of season clearance perennials and literally stuck them in the ground with grass all around intending to finally do my overhaul in the spring.

I even measured and started calculating and pricing for retaining wall stones.

Well there came spring and without going into too much of our personal lives, current events meant husband's job was looking a bit precarious. Definitely no hundreds of dollars "beautification" projects happening right now!

I made lemonade with some random edging materials we had lying around and extra dirt from the back of the shed so I could at least get some plants establishing until I could do more.

Getting that cursed knock-out rose out was such an awful (thorns! ON THE ROOTS! 😖😖), but satisfying task. I replaced it with a mostly evergreen Shrubby St. Johns Wort (Hypericum prolificum) that I had gotten established in the back yard knowing it would do better in the front. 

Well, thankfully things somewhat stabilized within a month or so and we decided since I had a good quantity of soil already on hand, with el cheapo blocks, I could pull the trigger on the top tier!

Bless my Dad for  yet again  being my grunt force labor in helping me load up my car and his rental (I was about 13 blocks too many for being too-close-to-the-weight-capacity-for-comfort!)

And thus began what I believe to be my least favorite job in all of landscaping: leveling stones to build a retaining wall. 😩😩😩

 

At one point I had to REDO the corner since I didn't like how much it had sagged with my following the driveway slope, but not wanting that much of a slope from the wall to the front of the bed 😵 

It took shape slooooowly over a few days and then I was able to continue moving/dividing and plant with what I already had and only had to buy a few more plants.

Within a few weeks I had used all the stones I had bought, which got me farther than I had planned, at which point husband said for just the last few stones it would take (the front level is mostly just one stone deep), I should just go get the last load to finish!!!

I am so pleased with how it came out, although I certainly would have chosen prettier stones if money were no object. The ultimate goal is for plants to fill it in anyway, so most shouldn't be visible for most of the year. 

It became delightful to watch the gardens fill in over the summer. And yes, I know the 'Black Truffle' cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis) are a cultivar, not a straight native, but I needed some leaf color variety and boy they did not disappoint! 

The Shrubby St. John's Wort has the coolest flowers that bumblebees love!

Eventually I will pull out all of the place-holding violets and the top tier will have yarrow (Achillea millefolium) filling in as groundcover and the second tier will have creeping phlox (Phlox subulata). (Both are showing great signs of spreading well already this season!) 

The combination of the cardinal flowers and Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) grass is wonderful! And hopefully the yellow wild indigo (Baptisia tinctoria) will add glorious color too! (Unfortunately, I thought it was an early bloomer and then the St. Johns would give yellow in the later summer, buuuuut that's blue indigo that's earlier, so turns out the yellows overlap🤦) 

All of the snapdragons just emerged by themselves! And I was glad to see many of my calla lilies and other spring and summer bulbs survived being buried with a lot of soil.

I did end up moving the bottom tier stones back a few inches to make the tiers more proportional and because I realized I had likely buried my tulips. 😬

That move helped it look much better and thankfully some of them are emerging this spring, but I think I'll have to do some excavating surgery after bloom time.

The celosia also came back wonderfully considering how deep those seeds had been buried too! (They're a non-native I also can't quite part with because they're so cool looking and bloom late summer all the way until our first freeze!)

Everything filled in shockingly well for how new most of it was! Unfortunately either because they're so new or because they don't get enough sun, the bluestem and cardinal flowers did get quite floppy, so I'll have to work on that.

And what about the other side of the house?!

It got some love as well with an expanded bed and plantings that better match the right side of the house (bluestem, cardinal flowers, tickseed (Coreopsis), creeping phlox, baptisia, St. Johns wort). Plus I added a Dwarf Fothergilla (gardenii).

Eventually I would love to edge it with the same stones as the right side, but since that's aesthetics and not structural needs (this side of the house is higher and less sloped), it'll have to wait. 

Of course I added compost to my revised beds and therefore of course I grew a pepper plant in this front flower bed right next to my front door. 

We ate about 4 very tiny very bitter peppers in the fall.
(And by 'we' I mean the really cute 3 year-old and 5 year-old garbage disposals who think eating dandelion flowers is wonderful, so have very low standards for outdoor edibles.)

It really was an ideal spot for a pepper plant: with the house and stoop, that spot is guaranteed to get at least 30 minutes of direct sunlight each day.

Can we talk about my favorites yet?! 

Likely through my gardening group, I came across Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana)! I needed one! (Was SO excited to find it at an all native nursery that's not horribly far from my house.)

A lovely shrub that will hopefully fill the big empty wall spot between the windows nicely, but most incredibly are the berries that come in the fall!!

And they're edible!

Not generally by normal people, of course, unless it's for a jam with copious amounts of sugar, but the garbage disposals will be thrilled!

And then there was my unicorn. 

Also saw it referenced in my gardening group years ago and I wanted one so bad. I kept researching it and knowing I didn't have the space for it to spread out like it likes to. Every time I was looking for new plants to plant in a new bed I was creating it would come back up, but just never had the space.

But wait! 

The death of the monstrous shrub at the corner of the house meant maybe I could make room!!! 

Totally beautiful in the fall!

But this ain't called a red twig dogwood (Cornus alba 'Sibirica') for nothing! 😍😍😍

All the pictures I take and photo editing I try can't even do justice to its color. The red stems are absolutely spectacular! One of the plants where the pictures you see online really aren't exaggerating its beauty; so much so that I am not wanting it to start putting its leaves back on!

I cannot wait for it to get to the 8-10' tall it may get and start filling in that spot! Can you imagine all those red twigs in winter?!! Once I have enough, folks say they cut stalks and and bring them in for winter decoration!

So that's it! After nearly 15 years in this house, finally I feel like I have some decent front beds! Not that I won't continue tweaking and filling them in, but there is a more cohesive plan and look, not to mention how much easier natives make everything!

A dream finally come true!