Tadpoles fight over the bacon bits (white) in my pond

I’m new to the frog business, having unwittingly swept them out and over the edge of our pond for a couple years. It’s fed by an underground stream, then has a little waterfall on the lower end. Last year, to my astonishment, I discovered that the blob of little balls floating on the surface was frog spawn. Don’t ask how well I did in biology classes.

I rushed to the Internet and friends to learn more and, in the process, I fell in love with these funny little creatures who fill our pond in the spring. Last year they happily reached the tadpole stage and I think I spotted one tiny frog later, but they mostly just disappeared.

Shirley Curran, who writes the GenevaLunch book blog and creates our new crosswords, is a general knowledge marvel, and she told me that at a certain stage they need a little meat to survive. I had visions of every cat and rat in the neighbourhood coming to nibble on bits of meat left at the edge of the pond.

Then yesterday my husband, busy preparing our Sunday brunch, decided to toss a couple snips of raw bacon into the pond.

They loved it! The tadpoles spent the rest of the day going after those bacon bits and by evening the little creatures already looked bigger to us.

Now to see if we get any frogs. It’s a jungle out there, next to the farmer’s field.

Passion in the ponds

Frogs in Jura pond (photo, ©2010 Shirley Curran)

Late April at 1,100 metres, they are still just tadpoles (photo, Ellen Wallace)

The surest sign of spring at 1,100 metres altitude is not among the flowers, where the bees have been busy, or among the trees, filled with birds: it’s in the pond.

We watched the odd balls that hold spawn as days grew longer and warmer. About two weeks ago tiny, tiny tadpoles began to appear and the balls began to self-destruct.

The tadpoles grow by the day, have become more vigorous, and we are waiting to see if some will turn to frogs and stay with us. Every year in May they head downhill with the bisse (mountain irrigation) stream that feeds our pond and provides a small waterfall, and we rarely see the frogs before they disappear.

Shirley Curran has shared photos from her warmer, lower altitude ponds, where tadpoles have become charming, active and amorous frogs already!

Click on images to view larger (best viewed large, great detail!)

Frogs in Jura pond (photo, ©2010 Shirley Curran)

Frogs in Jura pond (photo, ©2010 Shirley Curran)

Crashed car in Thurgau garden, Switzerland (photo: Thurgau police)

Our Christmas tree has been languishing on the veranda, in its stand, but it must have dried out because this week it blew into my rock garden where it is still sitting. No one wants to go out into the damp to move it. It’s an odd decoration.

Even odder, though, is the crashed car that is sitting in a garden in canton Thurgau, Switzerland, after a 22-year-old driver crashed there. He ended up in the hospital after pitching his car nose first into the garden.

One small car, one large load of gorgeous plants

It’s been a rough and tiring summer, at work and at home, and the result is the equivalent of a bad hair day, called a bad garden summer. The lawn nearly died and had to be reseeded, one of my favorite flowers from the previous two summers turned out to be a ravenous weed and it took over. An expensive pine tree has suspicious brown needles. In short, the garden was three parts discouragement to one part joy in 2009. There is only one solution: visit a wonderful garden centre (in this case my favorite, Schilliger) and buy a carload of new plants! This requires more optimism about the state of the economy and my bank balance than the news page suggests, but what is gardening if not a reflection of optimism about the future?

Fortunately, my garden was spared the snow, but it was definitely a chilly rain that fell on my Alpine garden at 1,100 metres Saturday, 30 May. When the clouds cleared at the end of the day the peaks were covered in snow, as was a large meadow above us, near Aminona, at about 2,000 metres. Pity any hikers who were out for the long weekend!

Down below, farmer Bernard has been mowing the hay for his calves, too young to be out in the still cool and damp meadows.

My barrier between the garden and his fields, not very effective at keeping out wild meadow grasses and flowers, is a collection of irises. They always have a green backdrop and the additional pleasure of freshly grass or hay smells. Weeding the middle of each clump is not much fun at this time of year, though.

Shirley Curran normally writes about books, crosswords and skiing for GenevaLunch but it turns out she has another passion: ponds. She is our guest blogger, sharing the tresures of her Pays de Gex, France pond – not quite as close to the sky as my Alpine garden, but high enough.

By Shirley Curran

This morning I caught one of those rare moments – the yellow-collared grass-snakes (couleuvre à collier – natrix natrix) are usually very shy but this one was busy digesting an alpine newt (triton alpestre – triturus alpestris) he could barely move with his mouth so full, and I could even touch him. They are harmless to humans but wreak ravages on the newt, frog and tadpole population of the pond.

Yellow-collared grass snake, Pays de Gex garden

If you look carefully, you can see the newt’s feet. However, the newts are fairly voracious themselves – I have two varieties that are interbreeding – the alpine and the marbled kind (triton marbré – triturus marmoratus). They devour all the tadpoles!

My real loves are the yellow-bellied singing toads (sonneurs bombina variegata). We intervened to save them from being wiped out when a nearby pond was being bulldozed and they have returned to us every year since and breed in our ponds. They sing little high pitched notes and cheep and chatter very musically and softly.

They are intellingent and very curious and friendly – they like sitting on a warm hand.

Aquatic life in the Pays de Gex

Ed. note: I wrote to Shirley about my own surprising frog spawn, with questions because I’m new to frogs, and here is her reply:

My only advice about tadpoles is to be sure that they have somewhere they can put their legs and arms once they develop them. They are aquatic until then, but, at that moment, will drown if they can’t actually get a footing somewhere as they are amphibians from then on and need to be able to ‘walk’. They need stones near the water surface, or somewhere where they can get out of the pond. That’s why so many little kids have jars of frogspawn that die and rot – very sad.

Actually there’s a second bit of help – if you feed them dog or cat food in small quantities, or bits of raw meat, they will thrive on it – again, that is as they get their legs and change their diet (in a few weeks at your altitude – it’s altitude and temperature that control the speed of development). There are a couple of days before they become insectivore and leave the pond – I’m told they starve then, but doubt a lot of the rubbish that is in books, as my observations over the years don’t correspond.

The newts, toads, water snakes and so on will come by themselves. The snakes are a bit daunting at first, but are beautiful swimmers and very shy – and not at all dangerous.

Ed. again: so this leaves me wondering frogs? toads? the difference is? And here is what googling “frog toad difference” turns up: allaboutfrogs. We don’t have to declare them the experts, as Shirley reminds me, but I like to think all toads are frogs. And all frogs can become prince charmings.

Snow and more snow: the winter of 2008-09 in the Swiss Alps

Bits of old Christmas tree: I leave them over the hydrangea for nighttime protection

An exceptionally long winter, with the garden buried for five months under nearly a metre of snow, has finally come to an end, and the garden has emerged. Unscathed – well, not quite. Broken branches had to be sawed off several bushes and trees, especially saddening on beautiful little Japanese maples, two of which now look lopsided rather than graceful. At 1,100 metres they don’t grow much over 1 of 1.5 metres, so they provide lovely colour and elegant lines at a midway height between bushes and trees.

Otherwise, the garden has benefited from a long, slow drink all winter, with several shrubs shooting up a few centimetres in height. Perennials are coming up strongly. Birds and bees are all active and noisy, and there is no sign at our place that the world’s bees are dying out, so perhaps we can offer them a refuge.

Alpine pond frog spawn

The greatest surprise was frog spawn, although I swept several balls out of the pond while cleaning it before I realized what I was sending down the bisse. Our pond is actually just a rock-edged pause in the mountain stream, coming in underground at one end and running out a small waterfall at the other end. We don’t keep fish because we can’t. They would quickly disappear downhill. So I never imagined frogs could breed here and they never have.

Here is what’s been growing my pond. Now to see if we get tadpoles or frogs from this. I know very little about these creatures, so telephoned a knowledgeable brother-in-law in southern England whose response was only “I hope you can still sleep if you get frogs!” Their nighttime chorus is loud to very loud. I looked up basic frog information online and found it contradictory, so I guess we let nature take its course and sit back to watch the show.

Dry southerly and warm foehn wind turns the Swiss Alps air yellow with its Saharan sand

If you’re an international person who moves around, one of the odd side benefits is that you learn about the many faces of snow. I grew up in the Midwest, in the US, and winters meant we had huge piles of heavy wet snow dumped on us. I remember walking to school along what felt like an open-top tunnel. We were small people then, but these were enormous piles that gradually sank. That’s what snow did in that flat land: it sank, and sank until late March, when green grass reappeared.

Then I lived in Minnesota, not far from Canada’s Midwest, and our snow was dry and light. It had a particular crunching sound and feel to it that you get only in very cold places. Everyone parked on the street and we had long extension cords running out to charge our car batteries during the night. Most people put blankets over their engines as well, at night.

A hole appears in the snow

Snow in Paris existed only in the sky, for once it came too close to buildings and people it turned into something else that was brown and sloppy, lacking beauty or elegance.

Snow in Ireland, near Galway, arrived just in time for Saint Patrick’s day in March. It crippled the countryside, but since nothing happens there in winter it made little difference. It had the extraordinary quality of a bird that’s landed in the wrong place and is temporarily stunned, before it gathers it wits or its courage and moves on.

But Switzerland! Oh, snow in the Alps is altogether different, coming in great dense piles and then settling  like an older child home for the holidays. It ignores our usual routines, our expectations of daily life: it’s noisy with snowplows (heavy metal). It has an ego.

The hole grows, thanks to pressure from the wind

Or so it seems until it is diminished by the foehn. This, to me, a lowlander, a flatlander, is the great mystery of snow in the Swiss Alps. It comes, it sits, it – gets pushed away by these strange yellow winds that blow from the Sahara.

I spent part of Sunday working near the window. The foehn is not a gentle wind in any sense, or to any senses – it roars around you, turns the air yellow, shoves up against the shutters and doors until they bang hard.

It blows the snow, getting into every nook and cranny and upright bank of snow until the white stuff can no longer resist.

The hole goes topless

First there is a hole in the snow. In the end, there is only the hole. The wind worked for two hours on the 100-year-old apple tree outside my window and won. The snow-decked tree was nearly stripped of snow in that time.

For further lessons on snow and how it works, the Swiss federal avalanche institute has a glossary that makes interesting reading if you are really trying to avoid going outside or looking for excuses not to work on your end of year bookkeeping.

Is this a snow hole?

Taking out the compost requires a tall person and snowshoes

We try to be good gardeners and citizens by composting as much as possible, which is easy most of the year, but it tries the spirits in winter when you have to put on snowshoes to trek out to the compost bin! The alternative is to put the compost closer to the house but phew! in summer you don’t want that.

There are two ways to bring the garden indoors at my house. One is to keep some of the flowering plants blooming a bit longer, or for the more confused plants, to get them flowering again, since it’s warmer inside than it is outside at night after August.

Geisha Girl is obliging by putting out beautiful purple and white flowers.

The other method is to cut and dry flowers, especially the herbs, when they’re at their peak. They can then share their rich colours for several months more.

Oregano is my favourite for this, and in winter I keep a vase filled with it in my bedroom, where the early sun picks up the deep violet tones.

A third method failed me this year. Normally I braid onions and garlic and they last well into the winter.

This was not a good year for crops and while the potatoes and pumpkins will hold out until Christmas, the onions and garlic are now gone.

Our loss, but before the snow fell last week I could see green tips, next years’s onions and garlics getting a good start.

Now to let them sleep through the winter so they can grow quickly in April.

(click on images to view larger)