Together with the wire rope (actually, at the same place) I bought a fastener – to tighten the wire rope – and brackets for its ultimate fixation. The basin is narrowing down to the bottom part, so it was pretty inconvenient to fix the carcass – it would repeatedly slip off. The basin, if put into a normal position and filled with water, is able to hold the carcass without an outside support, but fixing the carcass in this position is a nuisance.

    The clad basin doesn't get deformed anymore, even when filled with water. On the other hand, it looks far from attractive – the planks, the wire rope, bricks (these are used to support the board on the shallow side). So I decorated it with a bamboo fence. That proved to be the simplest and cheapest solution, though sawing bamboo sticks is a very dubious pleasure.

    We bought pebbles (river-stones?) in a seed – shop. There turned out to be a lot of limestone in-between the pebbles, so we had to sort it out by hand. Our first guinea-pigs – that is, plants we considered suitable for hydroponics – were also bought in the same shop. Deep-water plants were  given to us as a present by some nice people. So we had paper-reed, some bulrush, echinodorus, a lily and hyacinths. The plants were dotted with snail-eggs, and within a week there pipped baby-snails.

    None of our plants grows under-water leaves, while their above-water leaves draw enough daylight through the window. That allowed us to use a mostly decorative lighting. For that purpose we chose energy-conserving 11-watt lamps (equivalent to 60-watt) of the yellow spectrum (both the green and the blue spectrum produce a rather harsh light that is depressing for the plants). We switch the lamps only in the evening: for a couple of hours before going to sleep.

    So, we filled the basin with water and left it there for 2 weeks. Then we put in the plants and let them get used to the new surroundings for another 3 weeks. The baby-snails have been growing by the hour and crawling around, all over the reservoir. The basin water hasn't become muddy after the last cleaning – which means that the suspended solid particles precipitated rather speedily. Judging by the filter condition, there is very few light garbage in the water. Time to go fishing – eh, to buy fish!

Sancta Simplicita (Oh, Naivety!) (added on 3.9.2007)

    The reality had but little to do with my expectations. The main threat turned out to come from my own cats. No, they didn't care about the fish, they were hunting the plants! Murka displayed a lot of perseverance: to destroy the plants, she would even swim along the pond a couple of times.

    No physical punishment or smelling substances could possibly deter the cats. We had to take the extreme measures and bar the pond with a net.

    An insufficient amount of light proved to be yet another problem. The lily simply refused to sprout above the water. It might have saved it from the cats, but I didn't enjoy the fact even a bit. So I had to start experimenting with the lighting. Two special lamps (Flora 77) combined with a standard one (54) brought a real success – the lily has bloomed.

    The blossom of the lily and a normal growth of the tape-grass, water-hyssop and duckweed proved the viability of the pond. That spurred me to produce a normal lamp and to develop an AACD – Aggressive Anti-Cat Defense.

    I haven't found a suitable dome-lamp for a fluorescent lamp with a reflector – so I had to design it myself. For that purpose I bought 2 simple holder-blocks (for two lamps each), a sheet of corrugated plastic and mirrors. To prevent the heated ballast from damaging the mirror, I put a fan-kit over each couple of ballasts (the fan-kits were made of the otherwise useless old computer power units). I have no idea, how I managed to put it all together, but the result proved to be applicatory and eye-pleasing.

    As for AACD, I learned that cats were not at all afraid of water – as long as it doesn't move!

    On the other hand, they are very much afraid of water-spray – and all one need to do to keep them off, is to spray water along the border of the forbidden territory. Since the pond is located in a room, spraying anything beyond its borders wouldn't do. The only realistic solution was to take water in the pond itself and spray it from its edges towards the centre. I didn't want to turn the pond into a permanent fountain, so I had to apply a movement detector.

    An aquarium pump, several hosepipes, a T-joint, adapting pipes as barrels, and some wire – that was my initial "fighting set". The pump turned out to be too powerful – it raised the water in the pond up to 1,5 meters high! That prompted me to created a power-tuning mechanism – a drainage with a bib. By turning the bib on and off, I can direct the main stream back into the pond, at the same time regulating the height of the water-jet over the pond. 15 centimeter would do quite well. To prevent the water from stagnating in the bypass-pipe, I drilled a couple of holes in its lower part. The pressure sufficed to compensate the loss of water, caused by these holes.

    It took the cats a whole day to realize, that messing with the pond might be dangerous. The only shortcoming of the system is its self-activating tendency. Sometimes the detector gets on because the pump has been switched off – and then it takes several switching on and off before the system calms down. What's important, it does calm down after all.