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07/22/2008: "Birds Do It ... Bees Do It ..."

Living in the city sometimes means doing without, or trying to do with in much less space than the rest of the world. Such is the case with my back yard. I have everything I could want - rose garden, grass, hardscape, deck, bbq - only I have it all squeezed into a 15x40 patch of earth.

One of the things I have wedged in out back is a pond. It's one of those black plastic numbers, but it holds around 150 gallons of water, which is plenty to give me the two pond essentials - sound and water lillies. I've had it for about a decade, and how well the pond goes depends a lot on my mood. Most years, although it starts out fine, by this point it's usually a stinking, fetid morass of algae and flies. Some seasons, I take the time to maintain it - and it's no small amount of time - and it lasts all summer ... right until the raccoons tear everything apart, and I say "frak it".

Last winter, having decided there was no practical way to keep the raccoons from using the pond as their own private jaccuzzi, I redesigned the plumbing to make it more robust to their attacks, and gave it one more shot. I added the usual water lillies and even added some fish. Now, I'm not the kind of guy who'll spend significant money for a koi just to have it become some possum's dinner, but I'll spring for a bag of feeder goldfish. I even added some extra waterplants for effect.

A funny thing happened, though. Somehow, the combination of the better plumbing and the water plants seems to have helped the pond achieve a biological balance. I've got plants growing that look just like a minature kelp bed - I keep expecting a calico bass to pop it's head out. And while 4 of the 10 goldfish didn't last the first week, the other four have grown to 4 inches in length in little over 6 months.

So I go out this afternoon to feed the fish which, by now, recognize my tapping on the pond liner as the dinner bell. Here they come - 1 through 6. And then comes 7 ... and 8! What the hell? I look close - sure enough, two inch-long brown goldfish. Clearly, someone's been doing more than just eating and crapping! I was amazed - I've had goldfish in that pond pretty much every year, and never had that happen! Out of curiosity, I checked online and learned that if you get the right conditions - and that kelp forest is apparently the key - common goldfish can reproduce to the point they'll outgrow the pond. That'll never happen with my raccoon raiders, but it was reasurring and even a little magical to see the miracle of life right there in my pond.

Sort of makes you forget all the other sh!t going on in the world ...