Water works

April may be the cruelest month for poets, but for Western North Carolina gardeners, March takes the cake.

Winter water: This 6-foot-diameter pond will be hopping with life in April. photo by Cecil Bothwell

Springlike days abound, weeds sprout like mad, and you itch to get your fingers into the soil. Yet you know that if and when the big snows come this year, they may well arrive as Mother Nature’s April Fools’ gotcha. And while seed catalogs may help you pass an evening, they only intensify the call to action.

Still, there’s no harm in dreaming. And while you’re at it, maybe this is the year to put in a pond.

A garden pond can be the work of an afternoon or a season, as simple or complex a project as you choose to make it. At the easy end of the scale, a washtub, sawed-off whiskey barrel or child’s wading pool sunk in the ground is all you need to nurture a few wetland species and give birds a naturalized bath. Toss in a couple of goldfish, koi, golden orfe or native minnows for mosquito control, and you’re in business. (Note that koi and orfe need a lot of space—200 gallons per fish is a good estimate.)

At this point in the season, the water is unlikely to get too cold for fish if it’s at least 8 inches deep, and if some parts are 18 inches deep, koi and goldfish can survive year-round. Later on, neighborhood frogs and toads may hop in to lay eggs as well, adding tadpoles and attracting tadpole consumers to the biotic mix. Some sheltering rocks will help your fish survive visits by egrets, herons and other avian or reptilian sushi lovers.

On a larger scale, a depression in the soil can be lined with 45 mil EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer rubber), available for about 75 cents a square foot from many garden-supply or roofing-material stores. If you pursue this option, you’ll want to lay out your prospective pool with a builder’s level to ensure that the rim isn’t too far out of whack. Unless you have particularly keen vision, it’s easy to end up with a pond that’s a foot deep at one end and bone dry at the other. It’s important to remove sharp roots and rocks before installing a liner, and for bigger, deeper pools, adding a layer of clean sand underneath will help ensure that pointy protuberances don’t poke into your production.

Pumps, filters, waterfalls, fountains and many other accouterments can be installed as well, depending on your vision and your purse. A simple, leakproof pool is all that’s really necessary, although some form of aeration will prevent stagnation. A solar powered pump will do the trick and make green energy part of the greenery in your yard. 

Once the weather starts to warm, you’ll be ready for plants. A very partial list of potential cultivars includes: bog lily, bog violet, buckbean (or bogbean), calla lily, cardinal flower, dwarf papyrus, floating heart, giant water clover, lancifolia, lotus, Mary’s grass (also called vanilla grass), miniature cattail, moneywort, mud plantain, society garlic, spider lily, Siberian pink cups, sweet flag, water forget-me-not, water lily and water snowflake. For larger ponds, horsetail and water parsley grow to 4 feet, bullrushes send up 8-foot stems, while cattail and papyrus may reach 10 feet. Depending on pond depth, some species will naturalize given a sufficient layer of soil in the bottom. Others will do better in pots or planted along the margin.

If gardening isn’t gardening to you without edibles in the mix, watercress is easy to grow. The Chinese water chestnut is another yummy addition, though each 4-foot-tall plant produces only a few tasty corms, so you’ll need a good bit of space to turn out a meal’s worth. (This is not to be confused with the native water chestnut, which is considered a noxious, invasive weed in North Carolina and numerous other states.) Arrowhead, bog cranberry, cattail, duckweed, lemongrass, sweet flag, taro and water celery are among the many culinary pond crops. Then, too, there’s rice.

Just imagine yourself paddling a birch-bark canoe across your garden pond, bending the rice stalks over the gunwale and beating them with your paddle to thresh the kernels into the boat. Ah!

And while you’re waiting for your pond plants to get started, you can use your new water feature to foil those sinister slugs (each possessed of no less than 27,000 rasping teeth). Place your seed-starter trays on bricks, above the water level or just touching it (for moisture), and your sprouts will be safe: Slugs can’t swim.

So get off your duff—there’s a lake out there with your name on it. All you need is a little imagination and a backhoe.