I’m keen to attract as much wildlife as possible into my garden. So finding a way of adding a water feature has always been high on my list. This week I’ve succeeded – admittedly in a modest way – by creating a container pond, which now resides on my patio.
This is my first ever foray into creating such a pond, and so I drew very heavily on the wonderful advice of a lovely lady at The Waterside Nursery So a lot of the technical stuff about the plants shared later in this blog has come from them.
Choosing the Container
To create a container pond you obviously need a container. The Waterside Nursery has containers and they look lovely but they’re a bit too contemporary for me. I have quite a rustic (some might say scruffy) looking patio so needed a container to match. I also wanted something I could plant up conventionally and use elsewhere in my garden, if my foray into ponds failed! So I plumped for a lovely wooden half-barrel which Mr F-W sourced for me on ebay.
The Planting
The planting was made very easy for me. The Waterside provides ready-made planting schemes for a container pond. There are options for the sun and the shade. I was a bit confused by this as to be honest the patio position for my container offers a bit of both, depending on the time of day. However I decided that the sunny plant combination for a 60cm container would probably like the spot best.
Plant List
The plants in the sunny combination are:
- Nymphaea Pygmaea Helvola (attracts bees, butterflies and hoverflies)
- Iris versicolor (attracts dragonflies, bees, butterflies and hoverflies)
- Mentha cervina (attracts insects plus excellent for colonising areas to encourage wildlife as it gives plenty of habitat opportunities).
- Myosotis scorpioides alba (attracts bees, butterflies, hoverflies and amphibians – including newts which use the leaves when laying their eggs)
- Myriophyllum spicatum
None of the plants are familiar to me as I’ve not done a water feature before and to be honest all of the lingo around ponds was new too. For instance the first four plants are supplied in what’s known as ‘baskets’ which you can put straight in the container pond. I think I pictured tiny little metallic baskets (like an old fashioned supermarket shopping basket). But when they arrived they were more like little plastic pots with large-ish holes in their sides .
The plants that I’ve gone for each fall into one of three categories – oxygenators, surface cover plants and emergent pond plants. Whether you are creating a massive garden pond or a container pond like mine, according to the experts at The Waterside Nursery, you need still need plants which cover all three of these bases.
Oxygenators
The Myriophyllum Spicatum, which has the common name of Spiked Milfoil arrives as a bunch of 5 stems in a little polythene bag. You just drop the stems into your container pond.
It doesn’t look at all attractive – though I believe it will have some quite pretty little flowers in due course. However, this is a very important plant as it is an oxygenator. It photosynthesizes to produce oxygen during daylight hours which keeps the water nice and fresh. The submerged oxygenators, like Spiked Milfoil also compete with algae for the dissolved nitrates and mineral salts that are in pond water. That’s an important role as you don’t want your pond covered with algae!
Surface Cover Plants
The Nymphaea Pygmaea Helvola is a miniature pale yellow waterlily with green leaves with dark markings. It’s a surface cover plant. Although it looked a big brown and drab on arrival, I have high hopes that it will turn into an absolute beauty. It flowers May to September. However it has an important functional role too. Surface cover plants shade the water and give stability to the water temperature.
This plant needs to be put at a deeper level in the pond (with the top of its basket 6 inches below the water surface). However I’ve also just read on the experts’ website that if it arrives with its leaves fully unfurled, you should position it so that they can reach the water surface. Otherwise the leaves can’t breath and rot. (Apparently, you then gradually take it to its lower depth as it grows.) So I’ve literally just put down my lap top and dashed outside to put it a bit higher up in the water. Fingers crossed I’m in time haven’t already killed it!
Emergent Plants
The other three plants for my container pond are emergent plants. As the category suggests they will emerge from the water giving colour at different times of the year. The combination has a nice mix of a purple Iris Versicolour, flowering in May and June. Mentha Cervina (Water Spearmint), which flowers from June to September. Lastly, a white water forget-me-not called Myotsis Scorpioides Alba. Between May and July it will have little white flowers on loose rafting stems. These three plants in their baskets are placed below the surface of the water at a shallower depth than the waterlily.
Planting & Depths
The summer plant kit from Waterside Nursery was very helpful. All of the plants arrived with instructions on the depth that I needed to plant them at. In essence you put them in your container pond so that the top of their ‘basket’ (ie pot) is the required number of inches/cms below the water’s surface.
Simple – well almost!
I wasnt getting my container from Waterside. So, I didn’t think the plant support mesh which the company stocked and which enable you to position and keep the plants at the correct depth would work for me. I planned to pile up large stones to create shelves intead. But once the plants arrived I quickly realised that the stones would take up too much space. So this wasn’t going to work – ahh panic.
While I put the plants into temporary containers filled with my pondwater, Mr F-W rode to my rescue. He quickly put brackets on the half barrel (at the required heights for the plants) created mesh shelves. He then disguised these imprompu shelves with cut pieces of slate so the unsighltybrackets can’t be seen. (It’s a moments like this when I’m so thankful to have him, his skills and his shed full of ‘useful stuff.’ )
Plant Supports
If you’re doing a container pond yourself, you may want to think about the plant support side of things more fully than I did! Check out the options that are out there rather than resort to my adhoc approach. That said, the shelves Mr F-W has created are fantastic.
Water & Treatments
It’s best to use rainwater as it doesn’t have chemicals in it. However, I don’t have a waterbutt yet (it’s on my endless gardening to do list). So the water for my container pond came from the tap. I filled the half barrel a week before the plants arrived. As a result, the water had a chance to lose its chlorine. However, to be on the safe side, on the advice of Waterside’s incredibly patient staff, I also bought:
- Barley-Bio Algae – to add to the water. This natural treatment controls algae growth
- Chlorine Guard – to use when I top up the container pond from the tap
- Feed balls – you insert these into the soil of each basket in Spring and another later in Summer to give the plants a boost and keep them flowering
That’s it in terms of the practicalities. Now I have the plants under my care I’m going to do a lot more research, to ensure I look after them in the long term. But for now, I’m going to enjoy my little pond which sits on my patio alongside other containers.
It doesn’t look like much yet, but hopefully it will soon fill out and develop into something beautiful… and become a further haven for wildlife in my garden.