Wednesday 16 March 2011

Froggy Love

There was a neglected corner in our garden.
 Husband designed a pond, some men built it, and I planted it up. All this happened in 2008. It has been a joy and a focus point in the garden. We imported a bucketful of water from a friend’s pond to introduce some bugs, as recommended in the gardening books.


We bought some plants from a garden centre, and were given some oxygenating plants from the pond mentioned before. The plants and creatures have thrived. Then later we imported some frogspawn from the same pond (before we heard on The Today Programme that this wasn’t recommended.







Two summers ago we watched in horror as the tadpoles were picked off by the diving beetle larvae. They were so greedy we feared there’d never be any frogs.







Last year, we saw frogs in our pond, sunbathing on the pebbles or hanging out amongst the marginals and disappearing into the Hornwort if they noticed us. But on Sunday we suddenly realised that they were not only in evidence, but hanging out in a very amorous fashion: there is a positive orgy going on outside my window! There is frogspawn! We will have an added reason to pop into the garden or gaze out of the window: there will be new life developing in our pond.









4 comments:

Perpetua said...

And don't they make a noise about it before the frogspawn appears? We can always tell when spring's on the way by the sound of croaking from our very neglected old pond.

Wylye Girl said...

In our house in France we had bullfrogs. OMG can they croak! The first time we heard them we thought it was ducks and the children spent hours looking for them down on our lake. Your pond looks lovely.

Crayon said...

Absolutely love your pond! My daughter has always loved listening to the frogs "singing" in the old pond behind our property when she's going to sleep.

hausfrau said...

There are only a few frogs (10 is the most we've seen), and the noise was only noticeable on the second day, no longer. There are still only two 'balls' of frogspawn despite a threesome that have been tied together all week...