New mini pond

Hi all, new to the forum thing! Have been gardening for a while and have a young daughter so a large pond was out of the question! so I have tried my hand at making a mini pond. Its basically a large tub in a hole full of water surrounded in stones, filled partially with some stones and a couple of pond plants in it. One of which is a water violet to oxygenate the water. How long until wildlife is attracted? Anyone tried a similar thing?

 

I have something similar in my garden, created about ayear ago. No visitors as yet :-(

 

Hi JonRoll, sorry but its a case of sit back and be patient, wildlife will find it and only stay if they like it.
Its a common misconception that frogs live in ponds most of the time, they don't, they live near ponds, so if you want frogs, I would suggest you have some stones / rocks with gaps for frogs to live under, near the pond, maybe some short plants or grass? As JWK's picture shows the frog is sitting there waiting to see what is going to come for water and then become the frogs lunch.
I often see bob in the evenings, I have no idea where he came from, but he lives some where near my small pond. (bob is my local frog) Good luck.

 

JonRoll,
it could take from 1 day - 5 years.
it all depends on how inviting you have made it.
for example you are more likely to get wildlife within it if you have dense foliated plants within inches of your mini pond. for example lavender would not only look great but would provide a home to such wildlife, also remember to try and attract bee's which will then attract nosey flies which provide food for the wildlife. hope this helped!

 

Hi

I built a tiny pond last year. The smallest plastic preformed liner I could buy and just sank it in a bed. We've not attracted any new wildlife as far as I know and spawning or hibernating frogs really like a proper pond with mud banks to burrow in.

That said we did take a few small containers of water from a large local pond to kind of kick start the habitat and we do have quite alot of mini things lurking like tiny louses and little swimming bugs. We also successfully hatched frogspawn from another pond and they grew to full frogs before leaving us. Last year we had a visiting dragon fly too which was nice.

Kate