The ‘tadpole’ pond

Never ones to miss out, this weekend our local garden centre was selling ‘tadpole’ ponds.

All you need is:

– a preformed pond

– bunches of ‘oxygenating’ ‘weed’

– some marginal plants

– a pond treatment

– and some tadpole food.

I’m afraid this is a bit misleading!.

Going through the shopping list:

As I found in the garden pond last year (we had an excellent emergence of baby frogs) you don’t need marginal plants, like Typha etc There were none in my pond at the time, and tadpoles don’t really need them.

What you do need is nice grasses for tadpoles to shelter and feed in, and not a stony edge. Creeping Bent, which came in from our lawn, is the commonest pond side plant in the wild in Britain. Unfortunately garden centres don’t sell it, or any other water grasses.

As we also saw last year you don’t need ‘oxygenating’ weed for tadpoles. Underwater plants do make oxygen, but they also use it, and algae will do exactly the same thing. A pond in full sun will be producing masses of oxygen without any plants (see the garden pond blog here to see how it goes up and down during the day).

You don’t absolutely need a ‘deep plant’ for the centre of the pond – tadpoles are perfectly happy in the sheltered edges. As for water hawthorn, which isn’t native – I would prefer to have a naturally arriving native plant, but water hawthorn would still provide habitat for smaller animals

You shouldn’t need to treat the water – rain water will be pretty much fine for tadpoles.

And you don’t need tadpole ‘food’ – they eat algae which will grow naturally (and the snails, worms and other small animals that fall in the pond will provide a supply of nutrients and dead things to help the algae and the tadpoles grow).

I think it’s great that garden centres sell products that help freshwater wildlife – but the products need to be better than they are at present.