Posts in: Sanity Project

Ridiculously cute frog actually sitting on a lily pad in Green Man’s Grotto. Maybe he’s admiring the hyacinthh bloom.


An update on our worms. (Thanks for asking.) They’re doing well. We’re determining through trial and error what they enjoy eating. So far they like:

  • Leafy greens
  • Any fruit
  • Cilantro

They do not like:

  • Squash
  • Basil

We’ll collect their castings for use on the garden this fall.


So the frogs are clearly enjoying our pond. As I mentioned before, we found a generation of “wild” tadpoles in our pond after placing six bullfrog tadpoles in there ourselves. An additional generation has shown up in the time since then. And now this morning, Rachel found a new clutch of eggs, making a fourth generation. (In the picture, they’re the tiny white spots in the roots of the hyacinth.) We haven’t even had the pond a month. And they say rabbits are prolific….


A few more plants have been added to the pond in Green Man’s Grotto. Tadpoles — both those we put in ourselves and the “wild” ones — seem to be doing well.


If you build it, they will come.

When we built our pond, we put in six bullfrog tadpoles and several aquatic plants from a pond supply store. Today, however, we have found at least a dozen much smaller – tiny, in fact – tadpoles in the pond. We know that a frog has been hanging out there but we don’t know if he has anything to do with this new development or if these hitched a ride on the plants from the store.

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We built a pond!

Green Man’s Grotto has been extended and now includes a small pond (4’ diameter, 2’ deep with a shelf at 1’ deep). We’ve added water lillies, water lettuce, cattails, and blue flag iris within the pond. Around it we’ve planted creeping jenny, sneezeweed, and yarrow. The stone is limestone which we gathered from the area. (We live in the limestone capital of the world, you know.) The pebbles are landscaping rock taken from another part of our yard, which we have future plans for.

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