The Wisconsin Gardener

I've always wanted a pond in my backyard. But I've got a small child so I'm worried about safety. And I don't like digging through rock! Then I heard that Olbrich Gardens in Madison offers a class called "Portable Ponds." I'm here with the instructor, Horticulturist Melissa Maurer to learn how to create my own little portable pond. Melissa, what do you do at Olbrich besides teach this class? I take care of the perennial garden the meadow, the big pond around it and then all the aquatic stuff around, containers and ponds. So, you have a few things to do. Just a few! I assume to start out for a portable pond we need a container. Exactly. What you look for in a container is no holes because you don't want the water to drain out. You're actually wanting the water. The bricks are here for a special reason, I assume. We put these in. Usually, I have marginals sitting in the ponds as well as submerged plants. So, the marginals need to sit up higher. So, the bricks just help. Bricks, rocks, whatever I have at home. Right, we sometimes use pots. So, any container, as long as it's ten inches. Right, ten inches. If you get shallower, you aren't going to be able to grow water lilies as well. Other than that, the sky's the limit. Have fun. But the bigger they get, the heavier they get. Well, we've got a decent container. What do we do next? We need plants. The first plant that we're going to put in is a hardy water lily. It is called Aurora. It gets kind of a mottled leaf with a yellow or orange-ish colored flower on it. This is a hardy water lily. Yes. When I'm planting in pots at home I fertilize regularly. Do we do that, here? Exactly. That was my next point. Before we put anything in we want to fertilize this. These are fertilizer pellets. You sink them into the soil and cover them up. You don't want them in contact with the water. And we can get those at any place that sells water plants. Now, you've stuck it in what looks to me to be the worst possible garden soil I've ever seen! It's pure clay, pretty much. Oh, good! Which is what aquatics usually like to grow in a really heavy soil. You don't want something light that floats. Right. Or, you can put it in-- This is calcine clay or baked cat litter, baked clay. Oh, okay. No perfumes. No deodorizers or anything like that. It looks like you've got a landscape liner in here. Yeah, the reason I put that in is because you don't want stuff coming out these holes. The soil would just leak right out. Well, we've got a plant, it's fertilized. It's in muck. Right. This one gets completely submerged so you put it at the bottom. The leaves are going to float to the top. We have enough water that those leaves will be under water. Is that a problem? They will be for a while, but they grow. They'll grow up to the top. What's next? The next one is our hardy marginal. This is Acorus, or Sweet Flag. It's variegated. And it's also our vertical accent. It's a marginal, like I said so we're only putting it half in and half out. That's what the bricks are for. Okay, so we want it sitting-- The water is going to just cover the dirt. Then, our next one is a tropical marginal. This one is called Water Zinnia. It gets kind of a small, yellow daisy-like flower on it. It's very viney so it's going to climb out over the sides. It will be our downward accent. So, we'll have a floating leaf something trailing and then the vertical. Yep, exactly. "Marginal" must mean it sits halfway in the water. Exactly. I'm trying to finagle the brick under there. This looks crowded to me. We're done? No, we're not quite done. We need an oxygenator in there. The oxygenator that I have is Myriophyllum or Parrot's Feather. It's a great little plant. You can pot it in soil but usually it'll just grow free-floating in there on top of the water. It oxygenates the water therefore cutting down on the algae. It's a necessary part of this design. Definitely. To me, the most necessary thing is missing. Water?! Yes. When I give this class, we don't put the water in because I get people angry with water sloshing all over their cars as they drive home. I usually give them the plants and the container. When they take the container home they can situate it in a nice, sunny location. Full sun? Full sun. Put your water in it and let it sit overnight so the chlorine dissipates out of the water. And then, go ahead and put your plants in. Great. What about winter? I assume this would freeze solid so we have to over-winter these plants. Yeah, definitely. The winter, you can take most of these plants out. They're really easy to over-winter. Okay, great. Thanks, very much, Melissa. We'll have information about over-wintering the plants and more on ponds in general at our Web site,

which is

www.wpt.org/garden