Water Gardening

We decided to try something new this year. We often take trips out to nearby Powell Gardens where one of their exhibits is an island garden where they have a lot of water plants. I've loved looking at their water lilies. They have large ones in a bigger pond area, but also large ceramic pots filled with water with other water plants in them and it looked easy enough to do. This year when the husband and I went to get our typical flowers for the front yard, we discovered they had water garden makings as well and thought, why not? So we came home with a huge ceramic pot, 2 water lilies, 2 water hyacinths and another plant called a Hippuris. Here is a picture of the next day after we brought it home:




Looks pretty sparse, and one of the lilies had leaves much too small to reach the surface, but hey, trial and error is a great teacher (oh yeah, and probably I should have done some reading up too, but hey, instructions are for whimps, right?) so we just thought we'd let it go and see how they did. Well after about a week, things were slowly getting bigger, and it seemed to be working all right. I picked up one of the water hyacinths, they just float on the top, and I saw some tiny white wormy things inching through the water, blech! Husband says yep, those are mosquito larvae, as expected, after all it is standing water. So away to the pet store I went, and now we have a couple resident goldfish on the prowl! I haven't seen any more wrigglers since, so they must be doing their job! Yay for feeder goldfish, pretty good return on a .75 investment huh?

So it's been about 2 and half weeks now, and here's what we look like:



Quite a difference yes? We may have to thin the water hyacinths down a little! Everyone seems happy, plants and fish! No flowers yet, but I've already had a lot of fun watching them grow, and feeding my little fishes! It really doesn't take much to thrill me. So, now you know why there are koi in lily ponds, to keep down the mosquitoes! I'll post more pictures in a few more weeks and see where we are!