The Wonders of Water Gardening
Seminars@Hadley
The Wonders of Water Gardening
Presented by
Doug Rose
Moderated by
Ed Haines
June 23, 2016
Ed Haines
Let me officially welcome you guys to today’s Seminars@Hadley. My name is Ed Haines and I’m an instructor at Hadley Institute. I’m also privileged to teach a course for Hadley called Container Gardening. Now, for several years, Hadley’s featured a gardening webinar sometime in the spring and, before you guys catch the mistake, I know, it’s summer already. We’ve officially moved into summer, but it’s never too late to discuss our favorite hobby. This afternoon we are really fortunate because today’s seminar is called The Wonders of Water Gardening.
Now, if you’re like me, you’ve occasionally wandered through maybe a public garden or perhaps a private one, and it contained a water feature, and you’ve gone green with envy. That’s happened to me quite often. There just is something about a fountain or a serene pond that just sets off flowers in the garden and greenery in a landscape, and, if you’re like me, you thought, “Man, I wish I really had a water feature in my garden.” So, today we’re in luck. Today we’ll be having a conversation with Doug Rose, who is a professional water gardening consultant. Doug and his wife, Patti, own PondWorks by Rose, and between them they have over 65 years of water gardening experience. That’s an awful lot.
Just as a side note, Doug is blind and has also enjoyed a long career as an assistant tech teacher, and, additionally, is the leader of a support group for older adults with vision impairment. So, you can see he’s a multi-faceted person. This afternoon, we will be grilling Doug about all things water gardening, and I know we will benefit from all of his experience. I think there’s few enough of us in the room that we’ll be able to pause often for questions, but if it looks like there’s a lot of questions, and I’ll be watching the time, if we’re running late, we may have to put a hold on questions till the end to make sure we cover our material. But I don’t think we’ll have any trouble. I should say also, this particular webinar is going to be more of less of an interview kind of format, so before I start grilling Doug, let me just first officially welcome him. Welcome Doug.
Doug Rose
Hello there, Ed, and everyone else. Glad to be here, because this is one of my favorite topics, so you guys are in trouble. No. We like to give out quality information, so thank you.
Ed Haines
Okay. You know, I think before we get into some of the nuts and bolts, Doug, I wonder if you could maybe just tell us something a bit about yourself. How did you make this evolution into water gardening? How did you get involved?
Doug Rose
Sure. Well, as a kid, I grew up visually impaired. I had sight till I was about 5 in one eye. Retinoblastoma, I had to have both eyes enucleated. But I grew up on a farm in Nebraska near the Missouri River, with water. I think some of that, where I could still see, and as a kid, a lot of that gives you impressions that stick with you. And besides being a sharecropper, my family decided with another family to farm this island out in the middle of the Missouri – well not in the middle – but it was surrounded by the Missouri River. I can still remember seeing the water, my father fishing, that kind of thing.
If I think about it, I think that’s probably where some of it started, plus, as you said earlier, we all seem to be attracted to water. We’re 70% water in our bodies, so we’re really water if you think about it. The Earth is covered with 70 some percent water, and, like you said, there’s just something that really attracts, I think, most people, that soothes their soul near water. So I think, yeah, maybe the early on farming, and then later in life got together with my wife, Patti, who’s sighted, and she enjoyed the water. Matter of fact, one of the first things we did when we met was go hiking in a stream. Yeah, I think that would answer probably how this all came about.
Ed Haines
Doug how did you actually get involved with water gardening as a business? That’s a big leap from just enjoying water features themselves to really doing it for a living. How did that come about?
Doug Rose
Well, that’s kind of crazy when I think back on it Ed. Let’s see, we currently live in Northern California, if you guys have heard of Redwood Forest; if you go too much further, you’ll be in Oregon. We’re right along the coast in Humboldt County. We moved here and were growing some water plants in our backyard. We live in a mobile home park and we own the house, but we have to rent the land. The landlord, he came by one day, and being an accountant, he said, “Hey, you guys could sell these plants.” And my wife and I said, “Well, maybe we should try that.” So we went to one of the local garden stores, it was what they call a feed store for – they mostly did animals, they didn’t sell a lot of plants – and we said, “Would you guys take us on consignment? We could bring you water lilies.” Well, we had no idea how to package them or label them or anything.
It kind of just evolved from there, growing them in our backyard with the landlord’s suggestion. Lo and behold, we started being so successful at it that he said, “You know, you guys can’t be doing that here anymore.” So he asked us to find some other place to do it. Then we had to start renting space elsewhere. We started at the local what we call farmer’s market, where they mostly sell produce and flowers, and that was a whole learning experience in itself trying to load up water lilies, they have to stay wet all the time, and get them to market. That’s kind of how that whole thing originated.
Ed Haines
Well, it already sounds like a lot of work. I think that leads to, possibly, my next question. Before I do that, I wanted to say, we did have someone text in indicating they’re having a little hard time hearing you. You might want to turn up your mic a little bit. I didn’t have that issue, but someone’s having a problem. At any rate, it’s obviously a lot of work, and now you’ve evolved into a professional consultant for people who want to have water gardens. I think a lot of us shy away from doing a water feature in our own gardens because we just don’t know how to begin. It does sound like a lot of scary work, so I wonder if you can tell us what sort of questions our listeners should be asking themselves even before they get involved. If you have a customer that approaches you and says they want to have a project, what are the kinds of things they need to think about before even contemplating beginning a water feature?
Doug Rose
Ed that is probably one of the best questions anybody could ask themselves. Too many times I have seen people just – we get real excited, “Oh, wouldn’t it be neat to have the sound of water, the look of fish swimming around,” and this kind of thing. They just go out and they excavate a hole in their backyard, and then they get down the road and it’s not working, and they fill it in, and that’s really sad to see. I’ve run into this several times.
I think one of the first questions is what do you expect from your water feature? Do you want to look at fish? Do you want just sound? What size a place do you have? Do you own there? Do you rent there? Just because you rent there doesn’t mean you can’t have some kind of water feature. There’s very portable ones, like you were talking about container gardens. I think that’s the first thing.
We had this one customer, and he got this big – it looks like a cement ball – it’s a buoy that they put out in the ocean. Well, he got his hands on one of these, it must be 6 feet in diameter, and he put a liner down and set it on something in his yard, and put water that trickled out of the top and ran down the sides. Well, it looked pretty cool to him, but then with water comes algae. So this nice looking ball, he didn’t envision as that, so he brought us in and we said, “Well, it sounds like you’re up against a couple things because you want to see this ball how you envision it, but it’s not going be like that unless you just bleach it and treat it like a sterile environment, kind of like an office fountain or some of those things that you run across.” I’ve found that with other people, too. They hadn’t really thought it out.
If you can get connected with, say, a pond club in your area – I run a pond club over here; several communities have them – or just talk to other people and keep asking, “Do you have a pond? Do you have a water feature that we can come look at?” And I think just experiencing different water features and ask the people that have them, “How much maintenance is this? Is it gonna fit in my location? What size do I have to fit it in? How much work do I want to do?” All these are good questions up front.
Ed Haines
All right, we have an idea of what we need to ask. We need to ask how much work do I want to be involved in and what kind of pond am I really looking for? For those of us who are rank beginners, are there some options for us who are just interested – and we have a lot of folks who will be listening to this webinar in the future, we’re mostly container gardeners; some of us have a bit of both – are there options for those beginners who are interested in a smaller water feature? They don’t want to go dig in their backyard, but they’d like something for their patio.
Doug Rose
Oh, this is a fun part. There are so many different ways you can go about incorporating, say, into your current landscaping, some kind of water feature. I have seen all kinds of ideas. You can go to the store, some of the hardware stores or gardening stores, and they’ll have anything from a little tabletop fountain that’s already made, or, if you like to be creative, you can think about, “Well, I have this old water pump, where we used to pump the handle on a water pump, and I just want to connect it to, say, a base and water and have it spill out of there.” This is where the fun, to me, really begins.
Then you can go up to what we call container gardening and water gardening. If you already have, say, a nice looking ceramic pot that people like – most of them, of course, are made for flowers and this that need drainage – but they usually have one or two holes in the bottom. Just get yourself a cork a little bit bigger than that hole and stick it up from the bottom, wedge it in there real tight, and then place it where you want it in your landscaping, fill it with water, and the water will tell you if you’re level. Then, if you’re not quite level and it spills out a little more on one side, just take some wedges from the hardware store, some gravel or sand, and if you can just poke it underneath the side, you’ll pretty much level it out. It doesn’t have to be real level; I mean ¼” off, that’s not gonna matter any.
Within there, you can put, say, a water lily. I suggest you leave it in the pot. Some people put soil in the bottom of that big ceramic pot and then just plant the water lily in there, but it’s easier for maintenance if you just leave in its own little pot and you can take it in and out and trim it and fertilize it and all that kind of stuff. And you can add fish in there, some goldfish, that will help keep down the mosquitoes, because people are always scared about mosquitoes, but fish love mosquito larvae. So just put some goldfish in there; they have what’s called mosquitofish. Then you’ve got yourself a nice little water garden right there. And from there, you can expand to more than one pot.
My wife, when we gave up the business, couldn’t get rid of all her water lilies because she loves them, so we must have 15 of these – well, we got them at Costco, the wholesale store that many people have, but other stores sell them – they’re maybe 20 gallons and they’re plastic now. They look like a half of a wine barrel, if you’ve ever seen a wine barrel, a wooden wine barrel. I’ve used the wooden ones, but these plastic ones, they work so much better. They’re lighter, they don’t dry out and fall apart and rot, eventually, if they’re sitting on the ground. But with those, you can have one, you can have two, you can put a little fountain in there if you want. If you get my idea, there are so many ways you can go about it.
Ed Haines
It sounds like there’s lots of options. You mentioned just getting one of these, and I’m gonna probably want to do that this weekend, getting a ceramic pot, putting a plug in it and filling with water. But I’m assuming, before I go on to my next question, the water you fill it with – I have city water, chlorinated water – is there a problem with that? What do I have to do if I wanted to start one of these small projects? Do I have to buy distilled water?
Doug Rose
Typically, I wouldn’t be too concerned about the water. Plants and fish, for the most part, don’t care too much. I will have to caution you, in some metropolitan areas, if they supply the water, they may have chlorine in it, which will dissipate if you just set it out in the weather for 4 or 5 hours. Some locations do use what they call chloramines, and that you may have to let stand for a week. But just maybe set it up for a week or something like that and then add some fish and plants, some, what we call, feeder goldfish. You just go to the pet store, and, I don’t know, they’re anywhere from 10¢ to a quarter a piece, and they’re kind of like the canary in the gold mine. Put those in there and, if they’re still swimming around in a few days –some of them will die off anyway because they’re not the best quality being shipped around in a pet store – but that’s kind of a good way to get started.