Please enjoy photos of three seasons of my watergarden: winter, spring, and early summer. Waterlilies are just budding. Summer and fall are yet to come... It was the first day of summer yesterday - but it still felt like spring - with endless rains.

Building a watergarden is a great do-it-youself project. It can be as simple as one or two trips to graden stores and one or two hours of your time for assembly. You do need however to have few fish to keep mosquito lavae away from the ponds and some floating water plants to feed fish. Pet stores in general have better pricing than watergarden or garden stores for small fish (1/2 inch to 1 inch at $0.10-$0.30 each), which are often called as feeder fish, meant to serve as foods for large fish. Once you have some experience with small watergardens, you may consider to gradually add some other features to them, such as a small circulation pump, a fountain, etc. The feeling of building a successful watergarden is the same as that of growing plants from seeds and flowers from bulbs - it is purely a joy and rewarding. This also makes you feel like a real classic biologist (if such feeling matters to you).

There are lots of interesting features in my watergarden. It consists of three ponds in size of 1600, 250, and 125 gallons water, connected by a 1500 gallon per hour circulation pump. The pump runs continously 24 hours a day with about $5 per month electricity cost. This pump will be turned out during winter. In Connecticut, the ground may freeze in about 1 feet deep and it has not reported to exceed 1 and half feet. In general, fish will survive through winter if ponds are 2 feet deep. If there are lots of fish and some large fish, it will be necessary to keep a small eye of surface (few inches in radius) unfrozen. This can be achieved with a small floating circulation pump, which continuously pumps 38-49F "hot" water to the pond surface. Such a pump works even at -5F surface temperature, which temperature ocassionally occurs in the coast area of Connecticut, but does not usually last for a long period of the time. There is a wooden bridge across the large pond, under which is the fish's favorite hideout. In the large pond, there are three 4-inch koi (one bufferfly tail or submarine fintail), two 8-inch comet goldfish, two 2-inch white puff head goldfish (a third one died), one 2-inch black moor, two 2-inch shubunkins, one 2-inch fintail, one 2-inch comets, and about 50-100 1/2-inch to 1-inch feeder fish and comet goldfish. Koi are long-live fish and easily live for over half century, while some fish may live a couple of years to decades. Additionally, there are 8 giant toppoles and one giant snail. Most of creatures have fully adopted pond's living conditions for over 9 weeks. In small ponds, there are only small fish. Mechical and biological filters are located at the smallest pone, which need to be cleaned every few weeks. Sadly, one puffhead died after I sprayed insecticide and weed-killer chemicals on the lawn next to the ponds. Either mists of chemical sprays or chemicals picked up during the filter cleaning routines from the lawn may accidentally have gotten into the ponds. Currently, one-fifth of pond surface are covered by water plants (middle June) and are expected to be so by July and August. Water plants include one pink and one white water lilies, one green tora, one water iris, and lots of hornwort and hyacinths. Additionally, there are a dozen of marginal plants surrounding the edge of the ponds (I will describe them in details sometimes after the summer - I have more than 30 varieties of plants, plus many unknown ones, by then I may call myself a horticulurist), and hunderds of tulips, which are now dying off. There are 4 under water lights (in colors of red, green, blue, and yellow) and 5 floating lights (in shape of drogonfly, frog, waterlily and lotus). So far, moor is only fish that is curious about under water lights. All fish love waterfalls and water plants.

Building a watergarden was not my original plan, and a raised garden for plants was. After I cleaned sods, I disovered that there were 3 large tree stumps, and one small one in additional three inserted telephone poles. Apparently after large trees had been cut, the previous owners inserted three telephone poles to prevent cars from being sliding into cliff nearby. These poles were 12-inch in diameters and made of chemically-treated wood and 4-feet under the ground and 2-feet above it. It took me about 48 hours to clean them out. I dug and cut two of the poles at about 3-feet below the ground, and cut the third one slightly below the ground where pedstral stand is placed with a gazed globe on its top. Among tree stumps, one was about 15-inch in diameter and at least 30-inch in depth. Underneath it, there was a 200-300 lb rock. After finishing digging the tree stump and moving the rock out, it left with a 4-feet depth hole. I had been debating for sometimes whether to buy soils to fill holes for a raised garden or pondliners to build a watergarden. Because digging is in general a difficult part of building a watergarden, I decided to change my original plan for a raised garden to a new plan for a watergarden. Once the new plan was drawn, I spent another 10 hours to dig and bury a 150-feet electric conduit. I consider my watergarden project at the medium-difficult level. I would not recommend you to build what I have accomplished unless you know you can move 200lb rocks around - Connecticut has lots of large rocks on the ground.

I had some frustrations in the building process of the watergarden. Because the ponds were located on a slope, I had to raise the lower parts of pond edges slightly above the ground. I felt very confortable to place the pondliners on top of earth padded with sands and placed cement blocks inside the pond. According to drawings of one pond-building book, this was the easiest way to make pondliners leveled and to have extra height when pondliners folded back. The book did not mention - or the author of the book did not know about - the fact the cement blocks continously leached Ca(OH)2 out and made the ponds un-liveable for nearly any fish. I had to take anything apart and moved these cement blocks out of the ponds. In doing so, I had to use over 150 sandbags to pad between these blocks and pondliners. Each sandbag contained about 5 lb of sands. By moving these block outside, I had to reduce the size of ponds because I had already trimmed the pond liners. The second most frustrated problem was that the ponds overflowed somewhere whenever the pump was turned on. This frustration had lasted over the past winter, to this spring, and to early June. Because of pump capacity, the pump can raised the water level in small ponds by 4-6 inches, leaks and overflows occurred next to the second water falls, to which I sealed well at the lowered side but not at the upper side. A third frustration was that fish waste and dropping kept clogged the pre-pump sponge filters every 3 to 4 days. This problem was solved after physically removing the filter In this place, I replaced it with bagged gravels to prevent small fish from being sucked into the pump.

Some photos of construction progress are available.

Updated on June 22, 2003.

Watergarden is one of my most pride projects in the year of 2002. It was completed just in time before the first snow strom of season. Lights are currently controlled by a mixed logics of timer, motion sensor, and light sensor without a bypass mechanism. The weekend after the first storm, November 30, was a warm day - all snow melted That day, I was able to plant 150 flower bulbs surrounding the watergarden, including a full 120-day blooming flower set, a set of peony-like tulips, and a set of fragrant tulips. They are: snow crocus mixture, grecian windflowers, angelique tulips, colossal daffodil, kaleidoscope tulip mix, strawberris/cream tulips, queen of the congo tulips, lilac perfection tulips, mount tacoma tulips, apricot beauty tulips, original poet's tulips, blue jacket hyacinths, blue grape hyacinths, tall dutch iris mixture, and mountain bells mixtures.

Updated on December 31, 2002.