Nature and Gardening

We'll have to see - since we're not trying to make it like 'perfect' (i.e. we're going for the nature pond thing) I think it won't be too bad. We took a bucket of water from a local pond to jump-start things and so we've got a few (native thankfully) snails eating algae, a ton of boatmen, etc. so there's a mini-ecosystem starting. Hopefully it will not require too much in the way of upkeep, but if it does at least it's small...

yes and no - we don't really know what we're doing with this thing (I am reasonably comfortable with terrestrial plants, but not water plants) and so we just randomly got one of those pre-set up baskets that nursery's sell... I guess they do that as well for water plants... Anyway - we realized that we didn't have any other height in the water plants so hopefully that'll work for them. We have sticks and bushes with some bare branches for the adults to perch on (and they do), but that's the only thing we have at the moment for height in the water so hopefully it'll serve for nymphs (if we get them.... which I hope we do...). I didn't want cattails (at least not yet) as they tend to completely take over around here...

I once bought a metal wash tub, put it on my porch, added sand, rocks, plants, fish and water... and called it a pond. It is pretty easy to do.

Anything that will hold water for a couple weeks will have tadpoles in it pretty quick.