Beautiful, Wren!

I have a 50mm macro lens and a 60 mm macro lens, plus a 28-75mm macro and a combination 75-300mm macro zoom. Plus 2 other lens. The 50mm macro goes to 1:2 live size.
To give you some idea of how much it will zoom in here is a male Carpenter bee siting on my thumb


this one I did trim some

Very nice. I keep meaning to get a macro lens, but good glass is expensive. I use my 70-200 for many of the same things, even though its magnification is only 1:4 rather than 1:1.

Beautiful, Wren. I long to be able to take pictures like that one day! I will. I just need to learn to work with what I have for the moment. In over me head with Nikon D5000.

WOW such beautiful ponds and water features. Ponds are just so adaptable no matter how much room you have you can have some kind of pond or water feature.
Jeri, That pond is huge and beautiful just think of the big tropical waterlilies I could grow if I lived there.
Henryr, Love that stacked pond. The whole area is just beautiful. If I remember right you have a very small narrow garden?
I have a couple of small ponds and water features. Here are a few pics from what I call the Birdbath Pond. It's a antique fountain birdbath that sits in a 6ft wide 3ft deep well. The water pumps up thru the center of the birdbath and overflows into the well. There isn't much in the way of filtration just the pump. I have fish and frogs in the well but you rarely see the fish as the water is usually completely covered by the water lilies.

Yes Holly I grow the Victoria water lilly until the water temps drop to 50 and then it becomes mush here too. I bought one of the Longvue lilies this year and it has not done anything. The leaves are as pretty as the true Victoria and they haven't gotten over 12" for some reason. I am very disappointed in it. But b/c it has stayed so small I am gonna attempt to put it in a kiddy pool in my GH and see if I can over winter it there and maybe next year it will do better. Here is a picture of the true Victoria in my pond a couple years ago.

1st night the Victoria blooms white



The second night it blooms pink

All your ponds are so beautiful. I just wish I have one to enjoy.

Do to a shipping error I received a large Tropical WL Bagdad much too big for my small pond but it sure is pretty. The blooms don't open fully for me. I keep getting plenty of them but I haven't seen one open fully yet. I am wondering if my days are too short or just not enough sun even though it is out in the sun all day.

Hi all,

I'm new here but love ponds and fish and lilies. I have 3 ponds here in the city, one outside, one inside and one on the roof. Here's a pic of the outside pond, it has mollies and guppies and angel fish along with a couple of plecos.




I've got 2 named tropicals, Foxfire and Wood's Blue Goddess as well as an unnamed pink and an unnamed night bloomer. This is todays Wood's bloom.

Hi Jonna!! I'm new to ATP but have been ponding for a while. Welcome to the forum!!!

Pretty pond pics, Jonna!
Love your signature quote!

I don't have a pond. Just a small bird bath that the birds and bees seem to enjoy. I like seeing all of your pictures and reading comments! Thanks!

Jonna

I like your signature quote too. I always wanted something really neat in my signature quote and could never think of anything worth typing

Your pond is gorgeous and your plants look so healthy and happy.

Susie - a bird bath is so necessary. I have several and wouldn't be without them.

I'm glad you got a chuckle from my sig quote. I was raised in southern California and it sounded so "valley girl" to me that I loved it, plus I do follow the sun.

My outside pond has been very stable for several years now, it took it awhile to get there probably because it is concrete and the water here is very hard to start with. The lilies bloom all year but more towards the end of the rainy season which is now. I usually have one or two blooms but if I get in there this week and fertilize I should have 4 or 5 at a time for the next couple months.

The inside pond in our entry hall, it only gets sun for a couple of hours during the summer and only light the rest of the year. I haven't been able to grow anything in it because there just isn't enough light, I do have bog filter boxes above it with pothos and philodendron growing bare root in the water. I could add grow lights but electricity is pretty expensive down here and I decided it wasn't worth it. I have cichlids in that pond, they have made way too many babies so I will have to get in there and catch some of them soon.

The pond on the roof is a cattle trough with lilies I'm growing out and more mollies and guppies. It cycles from green to clear during the year, we seem to have algae in the rain here and it is difficult to keep it clear in the rainy season. It gets full sun all year and the water is in the 90's F in the summer. It's hard to keep the plants fertilized enough, they burn through it so fast, so none of the lilies up there have very large pads or blooms.

This is the hall pond during the hour or so it gets direct sunlight.

Wow!! I want your hall!!

Jonna

I want your hall too!

Have you tried the year long fertilizer stakes?

I want your hall if there is a maid that comes with it!!! LOL!!! OK!!! I'm lazy!!!

Actually, that's only half the length of the hall, this is an old colonial. Yes, there is a maid that comes with it, Gabi takes care of the mopping and sweeps up a couple of kilos of dog hair every couple days. It's one of the benefits of living here, I'm in mourning because she has had to cut back her work days for awhile with a teenage daughter problem and can only come 2 days a week now. Not doing a lot of cleaning is addicting, it didn't take me but a minute to adjust to it. It's taking a lot longer to adjust to doing more of it myself.

There is a skimmer in that pond because I knew the dog hair would end up on the surface of the water. We have 3 dogs and they use that hall as a speedway, leaving clouds of hair behind them.

I haven't seen year long fertilizer stakes here but I do use the miracle grow spikes. I think because of the heat they seem to need fertilizer every few weeks, especially during this time of the year. I'm not that reliable at getting in the pond and putting in the stakes, I aim for every 2 weeks and it is often only once a month. This week I'm going to try and get all the pots out and add some more soil and fertilizer and hope for a lot of blooms.

Jonna have you tried cat litter instead of soil? It works very well. It has to be the cheap kind of cat litter at Walmart in the red bag. It has no odor protection just the baked clay.

So far I haven't been able to find that kind of cat litter, even at WalMart. Sometimes they carry the same things they do in the north and other times they don't. All I've found so far is the clumping kind. I get good black soil though and it is heavy and doesn't come out of the pots, I put gravel on top. It's been a year since I repotted them and the soil gets replaced by roots or just disappears. I also have compost but it seems to turn the water dark when I use it so I usually stick to the soil from the jungle.

I'm not getting in the pond today though, lots of thunderstorms.

Jonna

The year long fertilizer spikes work well. I start every new season with them and what I really like about them is that I only have to fertilize my waterlilies once. If I had to fertilize more often, it would not get done.

What I do not know is whether there would be problems getting them imported into Mexico.


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