I've never heard of iris rhizomes being eaten either! You have a very hungry critter there! Living in the middle of the woods, I've had to resort to all sorts of less aesthetically pleasing tactics in order to have just about any kind of tree/bush/flower/plant! We have beavers, so lots of trees are protected with chicken wire. I make lots of little circle fences with the chicken wire and have to put it around anything new planted in the yard. We have deer, beaver, coons, opossums, birds that peck seeds out of the garden, ferrel cats, mice that eat plants, and on and on! (we've even had horses and cows run through the property). Do you have a fencing around your yard? I just can't plant anything outside that fence without protecting it. What I've found is that something out there (I think a cat or a coon), is attracted to freshly-dug soil, and maybe the scent of my hands in the soil, and digs everything up. It usually doesn't eat it, but the roots die when exposed to air. Rather than a circle of fencing around something like your newly-planted iris, you can lay a piece of chicken wire on the ground over them for a about a week. After that, the fresh soil and scents don't seem to be as attractive to the animals, and then you can take the wire up. One thing for your little pond..........maybe you could fashion a chicken-wire dome that sits over it. That might be a little more pleasing to look at, but still would let your taller plants grow. And you could take it off during the day. Most animals won't mess with wire.......but you know coons.........they're usually pretty determined.....so I would anchor that fencing well.

I'm glad you enjoyed the picture. Every night we have several frogs and toads in the pond singing and breeding (toads also breed in water). They advertise by their croaking to attract mates I assume and then most are gone during the day. My only regret is that I didn't build the pond a lot bigger because it is so much fun to have water plants and fish (and frogs) and watch them have babies. And I use the water as a special treat for the roses. BTW, the frog is on the stone at 11 o'clock from the big red rose.

It's interesting digging down into boggy ground because you go through layers of different type materials. In my case, first there is a 6" rooty loose peat layer, where the material falls apart and look dark brown and fibery and woody, damp to wet. There is also old pieces of wood in it. Then, below that, is a totally different material thick that is dark gray to black in color, very compressed, almost clay-like, dry yet sticky, and is difficult to break apart. I think it is compressed muck. Then, below that is another type that is different again. It is greenish in color, slimy, wettish again, and has long fibers in it that look like grass or sedge. This looks lower quality to me. I haven't gone deep enough to hit substrate mineral soil, the above is no deeper than about 2 feet down. I'm thinking some of this material must be very old, ancient, and began to accumalate thousands of years ago. No mastadon or wooly mammoth bones yet tho :-)

I have a 300 gallon Rubbermaid stocktank in the ground. I used to keep a floating heater in it all winter, but realized that it was keeping it all too warm, and unnecessary. Last year I just kept the pump going (over a small waterfall) and it seemed to keep the frogs alive longer. So that's what I continued to do this year. Except I pulled the 1" pipe out further over the pond. I thought it might oxygenate better. Well, I guess I hadn't looked out for a day or so, and this morning I realized that everything was frozen......including all the water from the end of the tube down to the pond. But the strange thing was, There were 2 levels of frozen ice........The first one on top and then space, and then another layer about 10" below it. The top layer had a big hole in it, and I could see the lower layer, which didn't have a hole. The top ice had expanded about 5" higher than where the water surface had been, and the second layer is lower. I hope the pump didn't get ruined. Anyhow......I got out a smaller deicer, to just make a hole in the lower layer, which appears is working. Any explanation why there are now 2 different layers of ice, about 5" apart? Oh.....better mention that our temps for the past 2 days have been single digits and last night it was below zero. I can't make sense of how this happened. Why didn't it just freeze in one layer on the water's surface? I hope the frogs are okay (no fish). Thanks!