Pond – Down for the winter…

Last night, I finally broke down and emptied out my raised brick pond for the winter. The night-time temperatures have been slowly teetering around the 50 degree mark, with a few night last week in the high 40’s. In good conscience, I didn’t want the Endlers to freeze to death.

The pond is emptied for the winter.

So, I pulled out my trusty net and siphon and went to town. The ludwigia aromatica was still flowering away, but I was surprised to still find a few stems of rotala macrandra ‘green’ still alive — I had long thought they had melted away. The sagitaria subulata looked more like Val, as nearly all of it was 2 feet tall due to the shading walls of the pond.

I had netted out 100-200 Endlers the week before, but I still managed to pull out remaining holdouts. To my surprise, I also pulled out about a dozen cherry shrimp! I had thrown in about a half-dozen pregnant females earlier in the summer, but hadn’t seen them since. I figured that fell victim to the weather, or perhaps the frogs that frequented the water hole. (Do frogs eat shrimp? They obviously enjoy other their insectual invertebrate cousins.) Then of course, I pulled out more pond snails than I have any practical use for.

The bricks and pots are stored away inside of the pond.

I have my bricks and planter pots stored away inside of the pond. Otherwise, the only thing left to do is to build a lid over the pond to keep out any rain/snow/leaves that are sure to come over the next few months. Otherwise, I can just look forward to this Spring, when I’ll do it all over again.