A few evenings ago I went outside and heard . . . crickets.

I don’t mean that in the metaphorical sense of hearing nothing, which is what I’ve been hearing for pretty much all of the 10 years we’ve lived here. I heard actual crickets in our actual back yard for the first time.

The neighbors across the street who live in a big house on a very big double lot have always had crickets. Arriving home on a summer evening I would hear them, but by the time I got into my own house? Crickets (metaphorically, this time 😉🦗).

On and off through the years I’ve casually researched what crickets like, because I really like them, and wanted to hear them at my own house. But it was never a serious project. I just figured that if we didn’t use pesticides and made a healthy, pollinator friendly garden, they would eventually arrive.

As our garden has grown, we’ve had so many lovely insects arrive! On any given warm afternoon there are a half dozen different bee species, lots of butterflies (cabbage white, checkerspots, anise swallowtails, and the occasional gorgeous monarch), dragonflies, hoverflies, and all sorts of insects I can’t identify.

But crickets? Crickets. (Sorry.)

So, what changed that we finally have that lovely evening chirping? I don’t know for sure, but it might be the mini pond my daughter and I installed about a month ago.

When you look online for how to attract crickets, BTW, what you find is a lot of advice for getting rid of them. In different climates than ours they can be a noisy nuisance that get themselves indoors and keep people up all night.

A lot of the advice on getting rid of crickets says to fix leaky pipes and keep your house dry. They’re attracted to water.

Could our tiny pond have been enough to fill a yard with crickets?

Maybe that’s why our neighbors have them too? As far as I know, they don’t have a pond, but they do run the sprinklers a lot. Their yard seems perpetually damp, especially for our dry climate.

Monty Don is always talking about the miracle of creatures arriving if you build a pond. Gardeners’ World seems to have a feature about every other week where someone builds a modest pond and then delights in the frogs that appear seemingly overnight. Even after seeing that same story repeated dozens of times, I guess I didn’t really believe it.

And TBH, it could still be something else. Perhaps it’s just the transition from cool, foggy and humid to our first warm evenings in a while. However - we’ve had that transition every year for 10 years, and never any crickets. Hmmm.

If you’re inspired to build your own pond and want some ideas, here’s how I did it:

[Shout out to my sister-in-law! She built a small pond that we saw when we visited and swore it wasn’t complicated at all. That gave me the courage to try it without worrying that it would turn into a scope-creep nightmare that would take over my life. She was right!]

You can create a pond by digging a hole and lining it with rubber pond liner, but that seemed like a lot of work.

We used an old 10 gallon galvanized steel tub like this one.

Then we ordered a pump, this one.​

The pump is important so that the water moves and doesn’t become a mosquito breeding ground!

We then went to the nursery and semi-randomly chose two aquatic plants whose names I have already forgotten.

Planting was easy. We just plunked the plants into the tub, along with a big rock. Gardeners’ World always says you need to leave a way for creatures to enter and exit the water, a shallow “beach.” (Are the crickets using the beach? Is that why they’re here? 🤷🏽‍♀️)

Adjusting the pump was tricky, but very fun. We tried all the attachments, including using the included hose to make a little waterfall with another rock.

Unfortunately, all our experiments led to pumping the water out of the pond, either by a slow gentle dribble off the rock or by spraying all over the place. In the end, we just put the pump on the floor of the tub where it makes a lovely little burble, and the water stays in the tub.

Now, because the pump works with a mini solar panel, it just turns on every morning, and turns off every evening. I LOVE how automatic it is.

AND we have crickets!

Which, speaking of, is what you’ve been getting from me the last few weeks. (Crickets, that is.) Now that school is back in session and we’re getting back into “real life” The Orta Newsletter will be back to regular programming.

This week I’ll be sending out a few saved up items, and next week is our big end of summer sale! More details coming soon.

Hope you’ve had a nice late summer.

Until soon,

Anne

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1. Plan your seed-starting schedule with our ​free printable planner.​

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