Paradise in a Pot

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting my water garden ready for spring—fertilizing the dormant water lily, scrubbing down the walls of the container, buying and installing a new pump, searching for new goldfish to replace the ones that fell prey to marauding raccoons last winter.

Yesterday, it all came together, when I got the new pump up and running and brought home four goldfish to join the water snails that seem to be breeding quite happily. Snails are good—they keep down the green slime.

Here’s a piece I originally wrote for Seattle Weekly on making a water garden. (March 19, 2003). That's me in the photo, with my own hair. I was on Herceptin in 2003.

It's March, and my custom-made water garden doesn't look like much: just a huge blue jar of quiet water with two goldfish dozing near the bottom. Come summer, though, the water garden is a focus of life at my 1908 house in Ravenna. What exactly is a water garden? Mine is a 2-foot-high blue-glazed container. The relaxing burble of its bamboo pump drowns out car traffic and other distractions from nearby Northeast 65th Street.

Family and friends settle next to it on the front porch with food and drink, wrapped in the sweetness of climbing roses, honeysuckle, and sweet peas. The pot holds a fragrant yellow water lily; waiting and watching for the lily to bloom has become something of a neighborhood event. By midsummer, the lily's round leaves cover the entire surface and provide shade and shelter for the fish. Who was the contractor of this marvel? Me. I did it myself, and you can too.

You can make your water garden much more elaborate than mine. I've seen photos of one that has a remote-control train (!) to carry fish food from the house to the pond. But yours doesn't need to be fancy or particularly expensive, either.

I bought my pot at Oasis Water Gardens in Georgetown for about $300. The nursery is well named: For several years now, I've been dropping in on my lunch hour to stroll among the ponds and admire the koi, garden furniture, and plants. (If you visit Oasis in spring, look for tadpoles in the ponds on the property--a rare sight in Seattle these days.)

I added the water lily, also from Oasis, for about $30. The bamboo pump came from Bamboo Hardwoods (about $35). The goldfish I already had, but they had been indoor goldfish until I liberated them into the much larger container last spring.

Water-garden maintenance is pretty simple. I bought outdoor fish food and some kits to test the water, but regular testing hasn't been necessary. If the water looks a bit murky, I freshen it with the garden hose. It's pretty low-tech.

Surprisingly, goldfish in an outdoor pond don't need to be fed. ("People buy fish food because it's fun to feed the fish," a clerk at Oasis told me, "but they don't really need it.") They grow fat on bugs and algae. You should not feed pond fish in the winter, when their digestion slows down, as it can kill them.
The water lily needs fertilizer once a month (in the soil, not the water), spring through fall. In winter, I take away the pump and trim back the water lily, and the garden is quiet. The fish slow down, and they're fine even if the surface of the water freezes.

Now that March is here, it's time to bring the water garden out of hibernation: scrub it down, fertilize the lily, and set up the pump--all ready for another relaxing spring and summer on the porch.

Resources: Water Gardening Basics, by Helen Nash and Marilyn M. Cook (Sterling, $21.95); Oasis Water Gardens, 404 S. Brandon St., (206) 767-9776; Bamboo Hardwoods, 6402 Roosevelt Way N.E., (206) 529-0978.

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.