Hello,
My name is Kelly Rowe, 37 year old mother of two in California. I've
been lurking off and on, daydreaming about a pond for quite a while
now. Got a stack of black vinyl in a pretty gift bag on Mother's day,
and unorthodox gift, to say the least, but I was thrilled.

I laid out the pond outline the day I got the liner and my
long-suffering husband chiseled it out of our hardpan for me before
dinnertime. The next day we went to Lowe's to get a new liner that was
actually big enough to fit the the hole we'd made (learned a little bit
about pond calculations the hard way) I got some bog plants, a lily and
a ton of anacharis (how do you pronounce that?) from Lilyblooms, waited
a few days for everything to settle in and then added ten comets.

Two weeks, nine dead fish, a million mosquito larvae and about 100
gallons of really smelly water later I began to realize that, although
naturally balanced ponds may happen all over the world, it wasn't going
to happen in my backyard without a little help from me. I drained to
pond, put the plants in the wading pool, the surviving fish into a
bucket, hauled out the nasty liner (I don't ever want to see the strange
things that grow in the dark mud underneath a pond liner again) dug out
a bog area beside the pond, added a pump, a bog filter pvc thingy, a ton
bunch of gravel and even more plants.

So far, so good. Nothing's dead, nothing's stinky. The water's clear,
the plants are recovering from their rude relocation and Poppy (the lone
comet) seems very content. When the budget bounces back from this, I'm
getting some test kits and another batch of fish. I am in love with my
little patch of water, I sneak out to visit it several times a day.

Except...except now I can't stop thinking about that leftover liner
sitting in the garage and I'm thinking a bigger bog or a little
streamlet might be awfully cool. I have it, why not use it? All I need
to get is more gravel and a few more plants and some tubing, maybe a
more powerful pump...hardly anything, really. And there's that space
out front that would be so perfect for a couple of half-barrel ponds. I
mean, I'm going to have to find someplace to put all the extra plants
that will be outgrowing my pond eventually. I can't just throw them
away, now, can I? Ooh! I bet I can find a place for a lotus if I think
about it...

Oh dear...something's started here, hasn't it?