It's hard to see in the photos, but there's a terracotta bowl toward the back that connects to a pump near the bottom of the tank to circulate water. (This wasn't enough to prevent mosquito larva, so I add a small bit of mosquito dunk (bacterial larvicide) once a month.) The pond plants are creeping jenny (across the front), water hyssop (left), blue dart sedge (back left), Bowles golden sedge (back center), lizard's tail (back right), and chameleon plant (right side, adjacent to the creeping jenny). There are also some terrestrial plants in the planter/pot nearby: petunia, borage, peas, nasturtiums, buckwheat.
There aren't any fish. Our winters are harsh and it would be too difficult to net them out. I'll have to overwinter most of the pond plants indoors. The pond makes a pleasant, quiet babbling sound from the water pouring out of the clay bowl. It's been really enjoyable watching everything grow and thrive. I'm hoping to see water boatmen appear before the end of summer. The container pond is on the north side of our house so it only gets direct sunlight on half of it for about an hour each morning. This is important for keeping the water clear; in full sun, the water'd likely go green from algae.
I started on the pond back in March and got it to its more-or-less finished state in mid-May. After that, I started on the next project: a catio. See, we have two cats, Grangey (gray female, age 6) and Queso (orange male, age 3). Grangey is very well-behaved and comes out in the backyard with me for about an hour every morning. Maybe once or twice a year she'll start to climb a tree but jumps down immediately when I scold her. Queso, on the other hand, can't be trusted. We tried a lot, both with and without a harness and leash. But he always wants to climb the trees, climb the fences, go in the neighbor's yard, etc. He also startles very easily and has cut me up badly on occasion because a loud truck drove by. But they both love being outside.
Enter the catio. I designed it to be about 5' tall, 4' deep, and 2' wide. Originally, the entire interior space was going to be open for the cats to move around in, but the design changed over time and I ended up restricting it to just the upper third (which is why its floor is a little funky). Here's it's final form as of this morning:
The difference between the image above and the rest of the photos is that I added diagonal bracing to one set of legs. This was because I noticed it wobbled a little when Queso walks around inside. The bracing fixed that.
As I built it, some features got added. Early on, I realized it was a real pain to move. Our garage is pretty close-quarters, so any time I wanted to work on the catio I had to open the door, back a car out, and drag the catio out of its corner. So one of the first things I added were the retractable caster wheels.
Like I said before, the entire interior was going to be screened in. There's a fixed platform at the back so the cats would have space to stand when they entered from the house (through the cat door built into the window insert). Then, there were going to be other removable platforms/ramps inside. But I decided the bottom area didn't seem that appealing for the cats. By then, I'd already built in the removable front platform, so I just added another removable panel bridging it with the house-side platform. I didn't have much plywood on hand, so I cobbled that middle bit together from multiple pieces. And that's why the floor is weird. Here's how it looks from the inside:
The last thing I built was the roof module. It's totally separate from the rest of the structure, just fits over the top and is secured by three bolts: two at the front (with nuts accessible through those triangle cutouts on either side), and one near the rear center (visible on the underside of the nearest "rafter" in the photo above).
Anyway, I'm pleased with how it turned out. Like most things I build, it's kludged together and much sturdier than is necessary. A lot of the quirks resulted from trying to work with limited materials and tools, or trying to get the most out of crooked lumber with knots in inconvenient places. Queso seems to like it—he's spent at least an hour in the catio every day since it opened.
