Masha du Toit

I’ve been helping my father to create two ponds in his garden. The ponds are on either side of the path leading to the front gate. We started with a rough sketch. :

Then the digging began:

The blue pipes were put in to make it possible to connect the ponds to a filter, if my father ever decides to have one put in.  At this stage,  the ponds looked very like two graves, although a neighbour joked that he thought we were creating moats to keep the moles out of the lawn 🙂

Next came the cement and bricks.  The lawn on either side of the project suffered rather:

Now they looked even more like graves:

After the cement came the “lamination” –  several layers of black fibre glass.  This was a tricky stage, as it had to be kept dry for several days and the weather was rainy:

We bought some rounded stones,  rough “monkey” rocks, and retainer bricks to construct the interior landscape of the ponds, and the plants came mostly from a wonderful place called Riverside Aquatics in Somerset West:

I spent some enjoyable hours stacking rocks underwater, building up shallow places for the plants, which my father started adding.  We are slowly finding ways to make them look more natural, but at the moment they are just sort of sitting there in their pots:

The first flower!

The fish were added last. Just six fish to begin with, two lovely fantails and four comets. The fantails are truly spectacular but I could not get a good photo of them.

The fantails in their bag, and being released into the pond:

The fish still very shy, but here is one of them, swimming among the lily leaves: