Sunday, December 11, 2011

Pond Pump and Iris

In what is obviously a Christmas miracle, today I accidentally came across two pieces of documentation that I really needed and thought were lost forever:

(1) Our current pond pump's capacity is (a puny) 560 gph.  It's a "Smartpond" pump, model #DP560

To put this into perspective, my Christmas present this year from Matt is going to be a super-powerful "professional-grade" Savio 2050 (we got $100 off at Amazon!).  In other words, it will have 4 x the pumping power.  This will obviously require some kind of weir or basin at the top of our waterfall, or it's going to shoot water straight out like a fire hose.  Am thinking of attempting something with one of those cheap aluminum catering pans.





There's a guy online who shows how to turn a plastic tool bin into a weir, and I'm thinking of imitating him, only I need the flexibility of aluminum because of the irregular shape of the aperture at the top of our waterfall.

(2) The second documentation-related miracle was that I stumbled upon--and read, stranger still--an old Lowe's receipt that (amazingly) listed the name of the iris cultivar that I bought from them and then promptly forgot months ago: 'Spartan.'  (I had googled 'Hector,' 'Troy,' 'Achilles,' and even, desperately, 'Trojan' trying to track this thing down to no avail.  Right culture, wrong piece of geography.)  It's near the volcanic rocks in our pond bed, and is a lovely sulky shade of burgunda, or so the picture indicates.

Iris germanica 'Spartan'




No comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails