COPING WITH WILD AND CRAZY WEATHER (Especially with a Water Garden!)
By ANITA NELSON | Nelson Nursery & Water Garden nelsonwatergardens.com
In the space of 5 years, we’ve three disastrous floods, a major freeze that included snow. This year brought us a drought followed by an unusually rainy August. How has it affected my world, the water gardening world?
Surprisingly water gardens were barely affected by the crazy weather of recent times. If ever there was a time to consider a style of gardening little affected by outside influences this past 5 years proved it!
Curious to know why? Let’s address floods first since aquatics literally sit in water, they are unaffected by flooding unless of course it’s rapidly moving water. Fish are a different story and several of our customers lost their fish during the floods. Can you blame fish? They saw their chance to escape and took it! One can only hope they found green pastures.
Next came the freeze, in this case the fish fared better than the plants. As bad as the freeze was it did not last long enough to freeze and entire body of water. Fish are protected from freezing temperatures because they are under the ice in the unfrozen water.
Fish in cold conditions simply go into a state of torpor. They slow down to a low energy state. The unfrozen water also protects most of the pond plants. Even with the temps in the teens, our customer reported that all their plants including their tropical lilies did not freeze..
Now for this years drought. This should be self explanatory! Obviously, unless one forgets to keep their water garden topped off with water everything is the pond will thrive!
So what do in wild weather? Noting water is the insulating blanked protecting its inhabitants.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nelson Nursery & Water Gardens website includes many great videos for both regular and water gardens.
