This past weekend, along with wrestling our new Apple TV unit into submission, we also decided to take on the problem of the backyard pond. Well, it was no longer so much a pond as a breeding ground for the West Nile Virus, and that was the problem. The basin or the plastic sheeting under the rock fall had sprung a leak, so the water had been drained from the basin but water from the sprinklers and morning fog and rain had collected in the bottom as icky standing water, hence the breeding ground issue. Chuck had always had big plans, and that was really the crux of the pond problem: his plans were bigger than the space he had in which to execute them.
So over the past few months he has spent a lot of time looking out the window at the pond, walking out to it, sighing, then coming back inside shaking his head in discouragement. This weekend for some reason we were out in the backyard, and I said that we really needed to do something about the pond, and hey here’s a thought, what about a fountain? I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to us before, but we both jumped at the idea this past weekend. So much so that we went to Lowe’s for some other stuff, and found a fountain (nifty fiberglass faux-rock pond with a light, pump, and everything!) that we liked there and bought it! Then we came home and ripped out all of the old pond’s plumbing and brickwork. This turned out to be a biggish deal as some of the brickwork had been cemented in place. Once all was destroyed, we leveled the ground out, put some of the old bricks down as a base for the fountain and had the new fountain up and burbling in about ten minutes. Yay!
We did a bit more landscaping, including placing a Japanese red leaf maple tree behind the fountain for added atmosphere, and we planted a bunch of moss all around to top things off. Wow! In one afternoon we transformed the swampy corner into a little slice of heaven. Pics of the afternoon labor and finished product are here. And compared to the massive outlay for our electronics upgrade to All HDMI All the Time, this tranformation only set us back about $500!!
For a trip down memory lane, here are some snapshots of the corner over time:
