Plants for Pocket Pond - Do you have any to trade?

My partner and I are basically finished building this tiny pocket pond! You can see an earlier postwe made last year when we were wondering if we'd need to seal it.

In this post I am requesting aquatic plant suggestions for this small pond and will walk through what we did!



To start, I am hoping to fill this pond with a myriad of aquatic plants, ones that are edible for humans, beneficial for cleaning the pond and keeping the algae to a minimum/shading parts of the pond and ones that are good habitat for fish, beautiful, etc. Please tell me about pond plant that you love and/or want to trade. We have a lot of plants on our homestead and would like to trade them for some pond plants. Currently we have thornless blackberries (Chester, Triple Crown), boysenberries, Jerusalem Artichokes, Heritage Raspberries, loganberries, to name a few things.

What we did:

We chose a site that is nestled right in between a budding food forest in its 2nd year and our high tunnel. The spot already had a low indent in the soil and it seemed like a perfect choice. We dug out the pond and all of the rocks you see around the edge of the pond are from the hole we dug (it's rocky in the Ozarks!). We then lined the pond with chicken wire and made a concrete mix of 1 part cement and 1.5 fine sand to make a thick icing consistency paste. The bowl of the pond was finished by last year and we got some minnows from our creek and put them in there. I spotted all 5 minnows yesterday and we'll see if they reproduce. I would also like to put more fish in there.

The pond is 3 ft deep in the deepest area, and is 7 x 10 ft roughly in a kidney bean shape. It has a water shelf that is 1.5 ft deep and I was thinking I could put cinder blocks in the deepst part of the pond to act as a plant stand for the floating plants.

I had to go over certain spots with the cement mix to shore up any leaks. At this point the pond is all ready to go and I'm looking for plants to put in it! It is in a spot that had a ton of yarrow and yarrow is coming up all around the berm of the pond. I also sowed echinacea, our native wild skullcap, agastache, clover and we planted a lingonberry in the berm. Aronias and wild false indigo are in a hedge to the north of the pond and the food forest mentioned earlier is to the northwest. It has a paw paw, asparagus, hazelnuts, blueberries, agastache, currants, serviceberries, mulberries, apple, nettle, yaupon, walking onion and strawberries. to the west we have raspberries, lavender, wild false indigo and the south is the high tunnel. I think this spot will fill in nicely in coming years and we've already noticed our animals love drinking from the pond and I've seen a couple frogs. We're hoping it becomes a little haven for LIFE in the midst of our gardens.

I definitely want to put some water lily and water hyacinth in the pond and am looking for other beautiful and edible plants like American water lotus. Looking forward to hearing your other suggestions! Thanks!

Also, we're hosting an internship this summer on our permaculture homestead. Check out our post!

Did you seal the pond?  
I used to do aquatic plants within an aquarium, I know wisteria and peace-lilly does well in this type of setup.  However, peace lilly is poisonous to cats.  I had the roots of a wisteria plant growing out of my aquarium and it would take off.  Attempted to get it to flower, had a few buds, but never bloomed like I had wished it would.  Never grown food out of an aquarium, heard of a few people who had, but I think they had an aquaponics system set up where the water would flood the roots of what they were growing for a period of time and then go back into the pond.  

I can send you Chinese Water Chestnut and Louisiana Iris.  I would love some Blackberries in exchange.

Carson Albright wrote:Did you seal the pond?  
I used to do aquatic plants within an aquarium, I know wisteria and peace-lilly does well in this type of setup.  However, peace lilly is poisonous to cats.  I had the roots of a wisteria plant growing out of my aquarium and it would take off.  Attempted to get it to flower, had a few buds, but never bloomed like I had wished it would.  Never grown food out of an aquarium, heard of a few people who had, but I think they had an aquaponics system set up where the water would flood the roots of what they were growing for a period of time and then go back into the pond.  

No we did not seal the pond. I don't think it is necessary for our purposes and we haven't had an issue. We'll see how it does with time. Thank you for your suggestions. We are getting a wisteria this year from a neighbor and may put it on a high arch near the driveway to make the most of those beautiful blooms!

Tyler Ludens wrote:I can send you Chinese Water Chestnut and Louisiana Iris.  I would love some Blackberries in exchange.

Yay! That's fantastic! Let's do it. I'll send you a purple mooseage and we can exchange addresses. Thanks!

Just finished the pond