Dee wrote:
In my house-hunting, I am finding that a good proportion of them have
in-
ground pools. I am not a pool person and have been rejecting these
listings out-of-hand.

But the idea occurred to me that it might be possible to convert a
pool
into a vegetable garden. Pools are usually in full sun and close to
the
house, so the site would be good. I'm thinking the floor of the pool
could
be busted up to insure drainage and the walls could be left as is. It
could then be filled with subsoil or whatever, with the last 3 or 4
feet
being a mixture of composted horse manure, top soil, peat moss, and
other
yummies.

Has anybody tried this? Any pros or cons I am not seeing here?

You're describing an absurd amount of compost & manure that would do no
good whatsoever buried four or feet deeper than the veggies' roots will
reach, & nutrients will never seep upward.

Maybe you could turn the pool into a koi & lily pond surrounded by raised
beds & with a big Chinese drum-bridge built over it. If you damage the
swimming pool you damage the property value, but if you turn it into a
beautiful pond well integrated into the landscape, you have something ten
times better than a dork-ass swimming pool for concrete lovers, with no
value loss & probable value increase since a well gardened home generally
sells faster than a well concreted one.

Here's one swimming pool converted to a koi pond:
http://www.kilk.com/pond/
The photos show the back yard evolving from suburban white trash with
failed pretensions, to a nice place to hang out in.

Here's another photo of a converted pool:
http://home.swbell.net/collardm/
You have to click on the pond photo to see it big. This one's cool because
it is so well integrated into landscaping that there's no hint remaining
that it was once a swimming pool.

Here's a page about converting a larger swimming pool to a koi pond; this
one isn't aesthetic as the pool was turned into a "practical" pond for
breeding & production, but the page includes some useful details about
what really needs converting & what issues need to be overcome for it to
work for fish:
http://www.koicymru.co.uk/ponda.htm

It could go without saying that koi are NOT the end-all of keeping fish.
Many native fish species adapt to bonds with great ease including crappies
which make delightful pond pets (or alternatively can be raised up &
eaten) & people with crappies seem to like them more than koi (crappies
will live happily with goldfish but large koi can be too aggressive for
crappies); they can be gotten from state fisheries, but in some places
they are easily captured in nets in shallow water. I had six crappies that
lived happily with some fancy-tail slowpoke goldfish without harrassing
the slow goldfish. Wild catfish also thrive in ponds & become very tame;
the catfish "school" when they are babies & don't hide like the adults, so
are easy to net a dozen at a time, though also available as babies from
fish farms & fisheries. I had several baby catfish that outgrew their
indoor tank so went out into the pond, where they did become a big
aggressive chasing after slow goldfish but didn't hurt them (I no longer
have a pond alas, this was some while ago). Many other native & game fish
make good pond pets. Here's a list of the easiest ones:
http://www.pondsolutions.com/faqs/pond-fish.htm
Low on the list are itty bitty mosquitofish which do well even in tiny
garden-feature ponds. They're sometimes sold at aquarium stores as
"tuffies" & I've had them living in a rainbarrel for years, which somewhat
makes up for no longer having a real pond. The mosquitofish or tuffies
come in a couple color forms but ponders should get only the rosy or white
ones because they gleam in the pond; the normal dark ones are invisible in
a pond. The rosy ones are even active when there's a scum of ice & can be
seen zipping around under the ice when larger fish would be inactive. I
love them though their sad fate is usually to just be fed to larger fish.

Here's an article that is more technical & how-to to create an
biologically ideal pond from an unwanted swimming pool:
http://wetwebmedia.com/PondSubWebInd...lpdconvart.htm

The Biggs Wildlife Pond used to be a swimming pool:
http://bigsnestpond.net/Pond/
It's not a koi pond; they are dragonfly enthusiasts (you can't have both
koi & dragonflies, as koi eat them). The pages at this website promote
natural habitat ponding instead of just doing the standard koi thingy, &
Biggs just happened to have started from a swimming pool which now looks
like a pond in the woods. T hey do some serious bird-watching around their
pond too, & have recorded the numerous species sightings on the website.

Here's a group discussion of converting swimming pools to koi ponds:
http://www.koivet.com/html/articles/...article_id=136
It's surprising how many people agree swimming pools suck & would rather
have a big garden feature with fish and/or water lilies.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com


----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000 Newsgroups
---= East/West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---