A pond is not just a pond
It all begins with an idea.
A pond is not just a pond.
Ever since I can remember, I have always loved ponds and waterfalls. They are like gazing into a fire, a glance is never satisfying. Ponds and waterfalls are timeless, ever changing, a form of meditation that is engrained and can never fulfil our animal instinct of living by them forever.
Like fire, flowing water is the reason humans exists on this plant.
Where there is water there is life.
My first real connection with ponds was in spring 3 years ago.
My own pond is the result of years of trial and error. I have now created a pond I’m truly proud of. It’s far from perfect however after a couple of years it works well and grows spectacular fish and veggies.
If that was all that it did, that would be awesome.
The Spring of 2015 was particularly dry following on from a very dry winter. All the usual puddles and causeways were all bone dry, not a mozzie for months!
Everything was very quiet. It was the first rain for some months and I arrived home early one morning after a good night out and attempted to sleep.
But no, mother nature was not going to let me sleep! The sound was deafening. RIBITS of all descriptions. As we had the only body of water for quite some way, every frog migrated to our backyard from what seemed to be from all over South Golden Beach!
There were hundreds of mating frogs on every surface in our backyard. There were so many different frogs that I had to move them to walk around the pond. They were only inches apart everywhere, even on every vertical surface! I have never seen this before and maybe never will again;
where all the stars aligned
and all the frogs so divine,
in all their glory, singing for what seemed just for me.
This memory keeps me going.
A pond is not just a pond, it is a source of life. I have made it my life’s challenge to create the perfect pond. One that has flowing oxygenated water throughout the whole body of water, replicating a bubbling creek. My years spent rehabilitating Riparian zones and chasing waterfalls has given me a life time of pond and waterfall designs ingrained into my imagination.
A pond is not just a pond. It shouldn't just have a pump in the middle of it which is turned on and forgotten about, turning it into a boggy mess in a couple of years. We can grow all the veggies and seafood we need from our backyard pond. We can gaze into it for eternity with the comfort of knowing this perfect ecosystem is looking after us and everything that surrounds it, nourishing us all with the most nutritious food on the planet.