You've found Dan & Rita's Goldfish Pond!
est. 1998

We have a few other pages online so click away.
Summer 2003 - Lots more to see here!
We made it through the drought of 2002!
More flowers in Summer 2001!
Let's see Summer garden 2000
Go back to Summer garden '99
Visit our Winter garden on Christmas Eve '99

This page may take a while to load because there are several pictures. PLEASE stick around! With any luck, you can read and scroll down page and the pictures should be loaded by the time you get to them. If they're not then, WHAT'S YOUR HURRY??? Ponds and gardens are for the few minutes (or hours) a day that you SLOW DOWN.

1. You are not allowed to talk or think about your job while visiting the pond area.
2. If ya see a flower you like please ask! I may have starts or seeds you can have.
3. If you are tempted to think or talk about your job, go back and re-read rule 1.
4. Hey, there IS no rule 4. See how easy this relaxing stuff is when you set your mind to it??

This is a picture of a tired but happy man and his new (goldfish) pond!  Note the "on my hands and knees" freshly scraped ground.  Also note the new barrel filter a-la garbage can.  This was taken sometime in May '98 and is probably the first day that the "waterfall" was in operation.  Finally please note there are no plants around the pond and very few IN the pond........YET

My wife and I have found new enjoyment in our "old" back yard!!  We added a goldfish pond and surrounded it with mostly perennial flowers.  It was one of those projects that just kept rattling around in the back of my mind for years and finally came true.

If you can plant a tree, dig a 'tater, mow a lawn, or keep up your own backyard, you can put in your own pond.
If you're interested, there are TONS of pond sites right here on the internet.
A good place to start is google.com and search for the words "goldfish pond". That'll bring up several pond hits and most pond pages have links to other ponds.
One of the neatest places to visit is the (goldfish-koi) pond news group.
It's called rec.ponds and there are lots of nice "did it themselves" folks there to offer you advice and encouragement. Most browsers will allow you to simply type news:rec.ponds on the address line and hit enter or you can try Clicking Here
If you have questions, feel free to write me by clicking the "mail dove" at the bottom of this page. Be sure and mention where you're from.

Wow, check this out!!! I TOLD you building a pond was easy! Just dig a little, sweat a little, sit back and SHAZAM instant flowers!!
Don't buy that huh? OK, the top picture of me sitting by the pond was taken in May '98. The one here was taken just 3 months later in August '98. Sure is a big change, don't ya think?!?
Just so you'll know what you're looking at, the garbage can bio-filter is hidden behind the tall red canna lilies that are in the center. If you look below Rita's feet you can just make out the creek stones on the edge of the pond.

This is a reasonable close-up of the pond when it was just about 3 or 4 weeks old. Note the size of the feeder goldfish. There is one bigger fancy tail that is about 4 years old. Spent it's whole life in one of those little 2 gallon fish bowls. He just about went nuts in this BIG pond but he's getting used to it now. Also note the size of the plants. Small lizards tail at lower right and left(arrow head shaped leaf). Parrots Feather, lower left (fern looking floating stems). Water iris at upper right (tall skinny leaf-stalks). Small watercress at upper right (the one that's not tall and skinny!). 2 pots of lily pads in center. If you look REALLY close in the upper left you can barely make out one little clump of floating tropical water hyacinth hiding behind another pot of lizards tail. NOTE:All the plants are fun but the parrots feather is extra fun because it opens every day and closes at night. It reminds me of little parasols when closed.

This was taken to brag that our water lilies bloomed. The red one was a gift from some good friends and the white one was literally ripped out of my father in laws farm pond. Now note the size of the water hyacinth (lower right and elsewhere).

Here is a close-up of what a "little baggie of feeder goldfish" looks like after 3 months. I read that you can expect about 1/2 of your feeder goldfish to die. Well, ours ALL lived but 3. That means instead of having 10 or 12 grown up fish in our little pond, we now have 20 or so. That's really too many but what are we gonna do, have a fish fry??? Besides they've sorta grown on us. They will eat out of our hands and they "come when we call 'em". No kidding, we tap on the edge of the pond liner and they come running er... swimming!

Note: the water hyacinth have taken over the pond. By summers' end we had removed four 5 gallon buckets of hyacinth just to keep the water open a little so we could see the fish. This started with just ONE plant!!
Click the Play button to hear my waterfall. (If using MS Internet Explorer, you can tap your down arrow button to turn down the volume on the player. If using Netscape you can drag the volume bar shown on the player.)
(For some reason, IE plays this looping sound bite seamlessly, Netscape plays it with a pause in between each loop.) Remember this is just for fun, I'm doing the best I can, programming wise ;-) This is actually a recording of the waterfall recorded with one of my kids "boom boxes" and then converted into a wav file.

This is pretty much IT for the pond tour, and this is where I sat nearly every day for at least a few minutes after work. Sitting here, I could just feel the stress draining away and the blood pressure dropping. While yer lookin, check out the park bench. We got it at Target several years ago and during a rainy weekend in the Spring we painted the flowers and vines in the cast iron. Kind of reminds me of the old circus wagons.

There are a few more pictures here of some of the rest of our garden if you'd like to keep looking.

Disco Belle Hardy Hibiscus. "hibiscus moscheutos disco belle". I just had to toss in a picture of our hibiscus. This is out front and it bloomed like this the last 2 months of summer and was still blooming at a slightly slower pace when hard freeze hit in late October.
The amazing thing about this is the blooms open and close in one day! The plant had hundreds of buds in order to bloom like this every day. It is probably the most spectacular plant we have ever enjoyed in our garden.
Just look at the size of those blooms!!!

There's at least 2 things wrong with this picture. 1- I'm in it. 2- it's out of focus. This is the only close photo of our new arbor. I planted some purple hyacinth beans on one side of it. Just 5 or 6 seeds. It must be related to the bean from "Jack and the Beanstalk"!!! It has purple vines. Green leaves with purple veins. It holds lots of purple and white flowers up high. The flowers turn into large "lima bean type" shiny maroon red pods. The pods last a long time before drying. The vine bloomed continuously from August till hard freeze. The flowers attracted humming birds and were mildly fragrant. Heck, I never knew a bean could smell good!
This plant is a LOT of fun. It's super simple to grow. Just plant seeds where they can find something to climb and stand back. Flowers were very pretty, this photo doesn't do them justice. Pods were huge and so shiny, deep maroon red that they almost looked artificial.

Rita didn't want me to include this one but I had to! Without her help and moral support and nudging me along, this pond and garden wouldn't exist. She spent more time out by the pond than I did which made me very happy. If ya think this sounds good then I encourage you to do it!! Yes we sweat some and spent about $500 total. Took a bit over a month to get it mostly done. The rest of the summer was nearly maintenance free. We're looking forward to Spring already! Note there are 2 buckets of floating water hyacinth sitting by the bench, ready for the compost pile.

This is just to show you folks who "don't live around here" that Kentucky gets a little snow once in a while. That is a picnic table on our back deck. This little gift from mother nature fell in January 1994. Early Monday morning 19 inches of sticky wet "snowball" snow fell between midnight and daylight. The next day the temperature plunged to 20 below zero for 3 days. It took us until Wednesday afternoon to shovel the driveway enough to get a car out. The roads were just barely passable at that time. My work was closed for the entire week as was school. You haven't lived until you've tried to shovel wet snow in 20 below zero. The snow would immediately freeze to the shovel and each scoop had to be shook or banged off the shovel...... really fun!! IS IT SPRING YET???

If you actually took the time to read this far.... God Bless You!
You should feel more relaxed already. This is a "do-able" home project for anyone with any yard. I'm talking condo-postage stamp size and larger. Water gardens are lots of fun and many are simply 1/2 barrel ponds sitting on someone's patio or deck.

If you'd like some information on what to do with your pond in the winter, drop by
Dan's Goldfish Pond Winterization Tips page.

Up to the top of this page
Summer garden 2000 this way!
Check out the garden of '99!
Chill out on Christmas Eve '99!
Dan's Garage
Haven't changed much on this page since December 12, 1999
BUT I'm still spending lots of time out by the pond!!!

Started this counter on August 19, 2000 and YOU are visitor # since that day!

Our free counter provided by