Red Rose Bud

After all of the excitement with first the Plant Swap meeting followed by the Pond Tour meeting, it was hard to come up with something to keep the membership’s interest. After all, both of those are the highlights of the Pond  Societies year.

Consequently, last evenings numbers were down considerably from  the previous two meetings. It’s a shame really as those that were not there missed out on first a great spread of sandwiches and veggies and to finish it all up, a wonderful Angel cake all covered in thick creamy icing. I hate to think how many calories but whoever cut it up must have been thinking along those lines as the pieces were about 2 inches square. There was nothing to prevent a person from taking more or going back more than once but I think that the small pieces sent out their own message.

Even I could not resist and ended up with two very small pieces and it was absolutely delicious. I told myself that it would be rude and bad mannered not to at least try such a delicious looking (and tasting) cake so I forced myself to eat it. Yeah, right…So much for Weightwatchers at least for last evening.

Bill Brister opened the proceedings with general comments about the upcoming meeting and some of the thoughts and ideas he had for future meetings. One of the things he discussed was the new website and the section that allows members to upload pictures. The idea being that we could develop our own gallery of pictures for all to see and enjoy.

Darren Bayhi making his presentation

The first speaker of the evening was Darren Bayhi who’s topic could best be described as Plant Fertilization. I guess that is probably the wrong use of the word as it brings up pictures of plants in some sort of harmonic relationship. Not what I meant at all. No, Darren was talking about the types of fertilizer to use on water lily’s and pond plants in general. He was very knowledgeable and talked for about an hour on the subject. He was able to get a lot of questions and comments from the floor including many from a gentleman whose name I did not get, who in a previous life had a lot of experience in this particular field. Anyone who has additional questions should e-mail Darren direct at http://www.austinpondsociety.org/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3 and click on Membership.

This short video is just the opening couple of minutes of Darren’s presentation.

Following Darren, Karl Tinsley stepped up to show a couple of interesting gadgets that he had purchased.  He gave a brief explanation of each one.

Karl Tinsley with his “show and tell”

Long Handled Trimmers full view

Basically he talked about four different gadgets the first two almost

Heads on the Trimmers

identical. They were pond trimmers real  name, Long Handled Pruners for reaching in and cutting water-lily leaves  and anything else that needed trimming without having to get in the pond.  Both have handles that can be extended  although one is longer than the other. These can be purchased from www.harborfreight.com item #66779 and cost about $25.00. There are also various other models on Amazon.com.

His next item was an interesting gadget called a Pond Shark. This consisted of an extending handle with an extra strong fish net that was held together

Pond Shark for cleaning bottom of pond

by a much stronger yoke than on normal nets that had rake tines on one side and a heavy-duty scraper on the other. It is used to clean the bottom of the ponds with the scraper pulling the muck into the net. For those of you clean water idealists, this looks like a good buy. It can be purchased from www.amazon.com and cost a little over $40.00

Full View of Pond Shark

The last item was very unusual. It consisted of a large sphere about 2 feet in diameter that sat with the opening just under the water and by some clever magic, gets filled with water. The idea is to get the fish to swim up into it and be seen inside this sphere. This can be purchased from www.addasphere.comand comes in two sizes 10 inch and 22 inch. The cost is $69.00 for the small one and $169.00 for the bigger one. If you log in to the website at http://www.austinpondsociety.comyou can see a larger picture of this sphere set up in Karl and Linda’s pond.

Glass Sphere

The evening ended with the usual ceremonial drawing to see who had won any of the small prizes that Bill and others bring every month. Our thanks to them for providing this gesture to add to the fun.

Next meeting is scheduled for August 20, 2012. If you have friends who are interested in “Ponding“, bring them along.