Flotilla

I was stilling by my pond today and I noticed that I have more than two baby fish. The water had gotten really low and so I had just refilled the bottom part of the pond, and that brought them all out or something. I looked carefully and I saw that I actually have LOTS of baby fish, all different sizes, some as big as my finger nail and some as small as mosquito larvae (although they're not, they move differently.) There are so many baby fish I can even begin to count them. They appear to be gold fish but they are not gold colored, they are all kind of gray, but as I have noted previously in this blog gold fish do tend to change color so hopefully this is not a permanent condition at least not for all of them (the photo is NOT of the baby fish, it is the older fish in the upper pool, I don't think my camera is good enough to photograph the babies yet.) There are so many that I'm a bit worried about what will happen over the winter, I don't know if my fish tank is big enough ... But no thoughts of winter now! It is hot and muggy and normally I would hate it but after all the rain it's quite pleasant and anyway there is a little breeze too which cools things off.

Transmogrification

I came home from a business trip the other day and noticed that there are now only seven fish in my pool. I'm pretty sure I used to have nine fish, at any rate definitely more than seven. There were also some mild signs of disturbance in the plant life. I think some sort of animal, probably a raccoon, came and caught them. They now have access to a really deep pool but also to the shallower end which would be easy to fish them out of. Then today I was sitting by the pool, practicing my new concertina, and I noticed two little baby fish swimming around in the lower pool! They must have been born and then swept over the waterfall and therefore survived being eaten by their ancestors! I was hoping this would happen. I only have positive ID on one of them, but I am pretty sure I saw two silver ones. I also saw a lovely water bug. But no frogs, I don't know what is up with the frogs, it's lonely without them. The photo here is of my cat tails, they are looking quite nice, I will definitely cut them and keep them as a souvenir this fall.

Cat tails

The cat tails which I planted last year are thriving, and it looks like I will be getting two actual cat tails out of them. You can't see them very well in this picture, they are not very far along yet, I will post a better picture when I have one. It finally appears to have stopped raining, just in time to not ruin everyone's weekend, but the wind is strong and the cat tails are leaning over in the breeze and bobbing around so it is hard to get a good photo of them. I need to get a better camera one of these days. The pond is leaking less but still leaking, I will have to do some more experiments to figure out where it is leaking from this time. I keep getting new lilies, all yellow ones, I thought I had a white lily in there but if I do it hasn't flowered. And still no frogs, obviously, because if there were frogs that would be the first thing I would mention in my post.

Pond patches

I figured out where the leak was, it was in the shallow area between the two pools. I am not sure whether it wasn't leaking before, or the volume of water was lower and so it didn't matter as much. Note the beautiful yellow flowers that have been growing beside the leak, fed from the large amounts of water, no doubt. It is very interesting how the leaks work, I think the water slowly finds it's way out and then, as it keeps flowing through the same path, becomes slowly larger and larger and finally becomes noticeable to me, filling the pool. I made this particular part of the pool early on, before I realized that you really can't use regular cement for that purpose because it is so porous. Last weekend I slapped a good dose of hydrolyc cement on and that has done the trick. But STILL NO FROGS. I'm starting to get worried by maybe it is so cold and rainy that the frogs don't realize that it is summer yet. Neither do the rest of us.