Attracting Newts to Your Pond
One of the great things about owning a back garden pond is the amount of wildlife that it will attract, and if you follow a few easy guidelines, you should be lucky enough to attract and establish a colony of Newts. If you are still in the process of excavating a new pond, make sure there is a nice wide low gradient side (like a beach area), planted up with low growing marginal pond plants, this area will make a safe inviting entrance and a safe exit for adult and baby Newts as well as a vast range of other visiting wildlife. If your pond is already established with no beach areas and just marginal shelves, you can plant various trailing marginal plants, such as Potentilla Palustris. Outside the pond in a adjoining border you may consider planting carpet spreading and creeping perennial plants that will hang down or creep to the water surface such as Mazus Reptans. These plants will provide a climbing entrance and exit to your pond for your Newts.
If you have a healthy planted pond and a good quality water balance, you are more likely to encourage Frogs, Toads and Newts to breed in your pond. You can plant up to two thirds of the pond with oxygenating, deep water and submerged pond plants. Submerged pond plants have a wide range of delicate leaves which newts love to lay their eggs on. In late spring and early summer, female Newts will lay their eggs individually on submerged leaves which they gently fold over the eggs to provide protection from various underwater predators. Baby Newts leave the pond in late summer and won’t return to the water again for one or two years when they have become fully grown adults. Adult Newts only spend time in the water for a few months during the breeding season and spend the rest of the year, living amongst and under dense vegetation or under cool stones and damp logs.
