My goldfish pond

[CometKeith]

slakker, Thanks. I think the plants do most the work. I don't really do much once it hits summer. I may have to add a little water because it hasn't rained the last week or so but that would be about it.

Addy, an acre of creeping charlie??? Let see... our house sits on about an 1/8th of an acre. Three quarters of that of that are the house, garage, sidewalks,patio, and the pond. So in terms of green space we are lucky to have 1/4rd of 1/8 of an acre or if I remember from 3rd grade math how to multiply fractions then we have 1/32nd of an acre of green space of which only a small section of about 4x8 ft gets creeping charlie! So if that takes me 2 hours to pull out then a full acre would take me 224 days working 12 hours a day!

 

[CountryEscape]

Sounds like an engineer at work there, Keith! I don't have any creeping charlie ... only creeping jenny, and she's allowed to stay. :blueflower:
I've always liked to mow my grass higher than most people, and this year was the first time I heard someone say that it helps choke out the weeds. I never know that, just didn't care for the scalped look. I do spray for weeds in the early spring, in my yard, as I don't care for the "yellow flowers" and clover that chokes out the grass. I have those things in the other part of my yard over by the barns, but not in my yard around the house.

 

[slakker]

I hate creeping charlie... and bind weed!!!! Hate the stuff!

 

[CometKeith]

Thanks CE, I'm not an engineer but our daughter is studying to be one at U of I and by the way she recently made the deans list! We were the only ones to get all the math word problems right when she was in 7th grade so maybe I started something ...

Slakker. i love what you guys did with the stacked stone for your waterfall. Here is a picture of some columns we just did for a bank. They didn't like the way we did the corners so we are going to fix them... that is with my new tile guy!

 

[CountryEscape]

Beautiful work, wish I knew a mason ... wait, then I would have to pay for all the beautiful brick and stone and would go nuts with that. Scratch that idea. Let me guess, the bank said the corners are too sharp where they stick out? Don't blame them. Public will find any and all reasons to sue for scratches these days.

 

[addy1]

We have bindweed, never knew that is what that white flower vine thing was called until I looked up bind weed.

CK yep cause my neighbors mowed so low the creeping charlie took over their yard and aggressively moved into mine. They have around 2 acres of just creeping charlie, almost no grass. He started mowing over into our yard, to help, but he scalp mows, I finally got him to stop but the charlie had moved in. I now have him mowing at around 3 inches, I mow at 4 inches trying to battle the charlie. I would take hours and hours and hours to pull it by hand. Just to get it out of my gardens takes hours, and usually 4 tractor bucket loads of it to dump, just from the gardens. A landscaper told me to wait until the plants died back in the fall and to spray the charlie with roundup. He says it is still alive most of winter, so going to try that this fall. The grass areas I am using borax and if that does not work, weed be gone.

 

[CometKeith]

Well, There are a couple ways to install this stuff at the corners. One way is too do it the way we did and butt the ends together at the corners and that's how slakker did for his waterfall which in my estimation came out great. The tile is polished so it's not sharp at the edges. The other way is to miter or cut at angles the tile so it looks like the same piece wraps around. It's a lot more time intensive to do the miter cuts but when you do it that way it looks amazing and I think that is what they wanted. There was a designer involved but he didn't say anything about it when the job was planned out. Somehow we will work it out.
Addy, good luck with the creeping charlie. I know everyone loves roundup because it is super potent but then biodegrades within 24 hours and is harmless to the environment. It does kill anything green and is not just a weed killer so I would be careful spraying it close to any plants or shrubs you have.

 

[ZenZilla]

Very nice setup

 

[CometKeith]

ZenZilla, thanks a lot. I started with a $150 pond kit 4 years ago or so. I was walking down an aisle at a home improvement store and it looked interesting to have a pond and knew absolutely nothing about it! It came with a little how to install pamphlet which told me almost nothing. It's been a lot of trial and error since then but have learned a lot from GPF once I found this web site and now I am pretty happy with the pond

 

[addy1]

Well, There are a couple ways to install this stuff at the corners. One way is too do it the way we did and butt the ends together at the corners and that's how slakker did for his waterfall which in my estimation came out great. The tile is polished so it's not sharp at the edges. The other way is to miter or cut at angles the tile so it looks like the same piece wraps around. It's a lot more time intensive to do the miter cuts but when you do it that way it looks amazing and I think that is what they wanted. There was a designer involved but he didn't say anything about it when the job was planned out. Somehow we will work it out.
Addy, good luck with the creeping charlie. I know everyone loves roundup because it is super potent but then biodegrades within 24 hours and is harmless to the environment. It does kill anything green and is not just a weed killer so I would be careful spraying it close to any plants or shrubs you have.

I only use it far from the pond and pond critters. That stuff wipes out anything it gets on. I have rinsed off leaves when it gets sprayed on something I want to live. You have about 1/2 hour to remove it. I have read frogs, toads will die from roundup. I make it super strong to spray vines, poison ivy that wipes them out.

 

[slakker]

They also make a corner piece for the ledge stone which is what I used on the house. They have these "fingers" that interlock on the corner and over-lap each other. I used the 15% overage that I bought for the house to build the pond...I only had 2 of those pieces left when I started my pond.

And for the record, mason's are UNDERPAID! Not being a mason, I did the work myself and could barely walk after 3 days on layer the CMUs! LOL!

 

[CometKeith]

Went to Galena over the weekend and hung out with some friends. Galena was the home of our 18th president, U.S. Grant. We went to one of those old fashioned supper clubs close to the Mississippi that served pink squirrels and grasshoppers.The dj started out by playing waltz music but we got him to liven it up a little by the end of the night! A few pics of some cool bugs (mayflies?) and some of the scenery outside the supper club looking towards the Mississippi. Yup slaker moving all that stone around can be hard. I remember after building my tiny waterfall I was sore afterwards for days.

 

[CountryEscape]

Is that what those flies are called, May Flies? If they are lime green, I always called them lace wings. I think they are kind of pretty, not sure if they damage plants, but I've seen them on my landscaping, although not sure of any particular damage. Bet the frogs like them!

 

[CometKeith]

Yep, did a little reading about them. Their larvae can live for a year or two but the adults live anywhere from a few hours to just about a day. They don't have mouths and have just air in their stomachs. They run on energy they built up as a larvae so you don't have to worry about them eating plants because they don't eat. When they run out of their stored energy they just die. The only purpose of adults is to propagate and they are the only insect to have double genitalia. They are more plentiful lately because rivers are cleaner than they used to be and the larvae can't live in polluted water. When they are all bunched together it is pretty disgusting unless you like that sort of stuff. I attached another pic of them I took. Even worse when they die en-mass on a boat or car they can be really hard to clean up.

 

[RachelTyler]

Hi, friend that's great your fishes are very beautiful.