July 2004 and Frog Spawn Pond Watch.
Please be patient if this page takes a little while to load as I have put fairly high quality photographs on it.
Earlier photos of the frog spawn are available on the on the March 2004, April 2004, May 2004 and June 2004 pages.
Well it's now July and high summer. The baby frogs are a little late this year but I finally saw one on July 1st. He still had a bit of a tail and was in the water, but on July 9th I saw a fully formed baby frog hop away from the plants around the pond. He was in the water before I managed to get a photo of him. He is really quite a light colour compared to many of them. I do seem to get a range of coloured frogs. I also noticed, when I visited a friend near Doncaster, that her frogs where a different colour again. They were darker with a lot of green on them matched her dark, mossy soil really well. Here they tend to be closer in colour to the Warwickshire red clay.
Compare him with the photos of Baby frogs from April and June 2002 (shown below). The frog I saw a few days ago looked far more like these. I keep hoping I'll get some Toads, but it's definately a frog.
We brought a solar fountain at Gardeners World Live. It has a separate solar panel that is outside of the pond. It works very well when the sun is out and has a rechargeable batter so that you can set it on cloudy mode and it runs when the sun goes in. Of course if the sun doesn't shine for a while it will go flat. Not keeping down the duckweed massively, but there is a clear ring around it now.
The Yellow Flag Iris seems to have an infestation of a caterpillar of some sort. I think it's Iris Sawfly. They made good food for the birds to raise their chicks on but did trash the iris a bit. In later years I wiped most of them off while they were small.
Do you like this page? Is it useful? Please email me and let me know. I always say that you can tell that it's spring when the frog spawn emails start to arrive, but I'm always interested in hearing about people's experiences. I get a lot of spam so put something about tadpoles in the title so I can spot people's emails!!
