The best surprise

If your garden doesn't surprise you at least a few times a year, I'd say that there's something wrong with it. One of my biggest sources of surprise -- both good and bad -- has been the pond. Almost six years old and different every year.

This year (after its makeover) it still seems to be settling in, with greener water than I'd like, but lots of oxygenator plants. Those are the key to today's post, the anacharis and hornwort.

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They're key because there's quite a lot of them already...

...which seems to suit the goldfish. The ones that I could see were tearing around, not letting me get a good photo:

In fact that's a pretty terrible image, and I probably should not have shared it.

The reason I did though...

...baby fish! (There are at least three in that photo)

Hello!

Hello to you too!

This next one was a bit bigger (still very small), and appears to be shedding:

This one was sooo tiny:

Sitting for a while at the water's edge I couldn't count all of the little ones -- there were probably a couple dozen at least.

How could there be? The fish have only been in here for 60 days (at most) and were pretty small when I got them. I had no idea they'd spawn almost immediately! Maybe the abundance of mosquito larva moved things along? Enough food for reproduction?

Plenty of habitat for hiding:

Probably more than I'd really like, but I won't pull any out just yet.

So surprising and exciting!

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