These days, habitat gardens are all the rage among eco-conscious Californians. They add native plants to their yards, patios or even balconies to provide food and shelter for wildlife.

But here’s the bitter truth: It’s not a real habitat garden if it doesn’t have a water source, as in a place where bees and butterflies can reliably sip without drowning or where birds can splash and preen.

In L.A., water rules everything around us. Drink up, cool off and dive into our stories about hydrating and recreating in the city.

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I have been pining for a water feature for years, but I’ve always been too intimidated to proceed. Store-bought fountains are pricy and their setup seems daunting. And while I’ve long lusted over hand-built fountains and elaborate ponds, I’m a klutz when it comes to building things from scratch.

All I wanted was a simple recirculating fountain near my bedroom window, so I could fall asleep to the soothing sounds of gurgling water. But the fear of failure always stopped me until I talked to people who have created their own water features and learned a few crucial tips:

• You don’t need a dedicated water line or even electricity and a pump to create a simple water feature. All you need is a big, watertight pot, wider than deep, a few water plants and a handful of little fish to keep mosquitoes at bay.
• Anyone with time, muscle and access to YouTube (or the library) can build a small pond or simple water feature, but there will be some labor and unavoidable expenses, so try to have all your materials assembled before you engage — unless you like interrupting your project to dash to the store.
• Proceed boldly, but prepare yourself mentally, because something always goes wrong, said Chris Elwell, co-owner (with his husband, Kory Odell) of the fabled Casa Apocalyptica, an arresting landscape of salvaged rubble, water features and native plants around their home in Mid-Wilshire.

“Just know you’re going to make a lot of mistakes,” said Odell, a civil engineer who built an 8-by-12-foot in-ground pond for their front yard. “You’ll screw it up, and then you’re going to fix it, and that’s how you’re going to learn.”

DIY water features instructor Andrew Chaves has created water gardens in recycled plant pots in his Long Beach yard.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

Stand-alones are simplest

Experimentation and patience are the most important tools for creating your own water feature, said DIY water features instructor Andrew Chaves, director of operations at Rancho Los Alamitos Historic Ranch and Gardens in Long Beach. He’s offering a class called Water Gardening in Small Spaces at the rancho on Aug. 4, and expects to teach another this fall at his former place of employment, the Theodore Payne Foundation.

Chaves doesn’t object to fountains with pumps, but he prefers the simplicity of still water features so he doesn’t have to worry about power cords or special water lines.

Andrew Chaves’ water garden, in a 24-inch-tall sealed clay pot, is a simple, serene way to bring water to a habitat garden.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

He creates “water gardens” in large, watertight pots with (mostly) native water plants that give insects and other tiny drinkers a safe place to perch on floating plants like duckweed (Lemna minor), mosquito fern (Azolla filiculoides) and miniature water lilies, which also shade the water and keep it cool. He keeps mosquitoes away with a dozen or so tiny fish that devour their larvae.

Chaves and his wife, Amanda, also dug out a roughly 4-foot-by-6-foot hole for a preformed plastic pond that a colleague gave them when he couldn’t use it. Fitting the pond into the ground was a difficult project, they said, because the hole had to align with the inflexible contours of the pond and sit flush against the ground. If he did it again, he said, he probably would use a heavy-duty pond liner instead, because it would be easier to press the liner into the hole and disguise the edges with rocks and plants.

Covering the edges of a pond is always a challenge, said Elwell, even if you use a pond liner, because it’s hard to make it look natural. People buy decorative rocks or materials that look pretty in the store “but end up looking hokey around the pond because you don’t see those materials anywhere else in the yard,” he said. “You’re better off using something from your yard, even if it’s ugly, because it looks like it belongs.”

Kory Odell built this small pond with help from his husband, Chris Elwell, in their Mid-Wilshire yard to create a habitat of native plants, water features and salvaged rubble dubbed Casa Apocalyptica.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

At night, their ponds are alive with frog song, and they do whatever they can to nurture their croakers. That’s why Elwell, Odell and Chaves don’t keep fish in their ponds; they don’t want hungry fish to gobble up frog eggs or tiny tadpoles.

Elwell and Odell have a recirculating waterfall in their pond that provides enough movement to deter mosquitoes. Chaves uses mosquito dunks, beige, doughnut-shaped floats that kill mosquito larvae but are nontoxic to other creatures.

In his small water gardens, however, Chaves prefers to use Japanese rice fish, which come in several colors, grow about an inch long and tend to leave beneficial insects alone, unlike mosquito fish, which eat almost anything in their path, he said. Tiny snails and shrimp known as daphnia eat algae and provide additional food for the fish.

A rusty repurposed industrial-sized spigot spills recirculating water into a small waterfall and pond at Casa Apocalyptica.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

He has several other tips:

• The best pots are wider than they are deep to give plants more surface space, but the best depth is 18 inches, to give the fish room to dive into cooler waters and hide. If you want to use deeper pots, you’ll need a brick or shelf at the bottom so plants that like their roots submerged, like water lilies, can still reach the surface.
• Unglazed pots like terracotta should be sealed on the inside with a rubber-based paint like Flex Seal, which the company says is safe around plants and animals once it’s fully cured (after at least 24 hours). The sealant is expensive — about $35 a quart — but Chaves has covered three large clay pots with that amount. He uses Gorilla epoxy stick putty to fill the container holes.
• Some water plants like to have their roots totally submerged, but you can’t grow them in ordinary potting soil, which will just float away. Some people use special potting soils for pond plants or pea gravel, but Chaves prefers a fragrance-free clay kitty litter, which is less expensive and heavy enough to stay in place in the water.
• Water should be dechlorinated before you add fish, by using special tablets or letting the water sit in an open bucket for at least 24 hours so the chlorine can dissipate. Chaves also recommends adding the plants and snails a week or two before adding a few fish, to build up a culture of bacteria that can consume the poop the fish will produce. Otherwise the fish could die from ammonia poisoning.

  

  Jesse Chang’s oval tub pond stands about 18 inches above the ground in his Monterey Park yard, surrounded by tall, California-native water plants to attract pollinators.

  (Jesse Chang)

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Ponds can be above ground

Jesse Chang, executive director of Catalyst San Gabriel Valley, is another fan of experimentation, along with heavy research. He credits “The Tub Pond Handbook” by Ted Coletti and the “California Native Water Plants and Life” Facebook group with helping him maintain the 85-gallon aboveground “tub pond” he installed outside his Monterey Park home.

Chang bought his roughly 3-by-4-foot oval tub secondhand for under $100 (a similar tub costs $133 new on DK Hardware) at the handbook’s recommendation because he wanted to discourage raccoons. Those animals can be pretty destructive, moving around rocks and plants in search of food — both Chaves and Casa Apocalyptica have had to contend with prying paws — but it’s harder for them to mess with a pond that stands 18 inches above the ground, Chang said.

Instead of lining his pond with rocks, he’s surrounded the tub with water-loving potted plants like monkey flowers and rushes to draw in pollinators and soften the hard edges.

He’s using plain old minnows in his pond for now to deter mosquitoes because he was worried that dragonfly larvae would eat his tiny fish. Minnows are much less expensive than rice fish — “about 20 cents versus $4” — so he started with minnows in case his investment got eaten. He’s lost a few, but most are looking healthier than the ones in the store.

Taking the plunge

These water gardens were lovely and relatively simple, but I still wanted the soothing sound of burbling water.

So summoning up my courage, I followed Elwell’s advice and began scouring YouTube for easy DIY fountains. That’s how I found a cheerful tutorial by permaculture landscape designer Daryl Lindsey of Yardfarmer in Salt Lake City with a title right up my alley: “Make This EASY, FAST, DIY Water Feature for Local Wildlife!”

Astonishingly, I did, although it wasn’t as easy or fast as I had hoped. It took me most of a weekend, multiple trips for things I forgot and a hard lesson in pump mechanics, but by Sunday evening, my little turquoise fountain was ready to turn on.

Following Lindsey’s advice, I rummaged through my collection of containers and found a large ceramic pot without a drain hole to use as my reservoir — saving myself at least $50 to $100 — and purchased the following:

• A submersible recirculating pump with 6.5 feet of half-inch tubing and several connectors ($30 from Amazon).
• A tall black pot to fit upside down in my reservoir, to cover the pump and give my water feature some extra height ($20 on sale at Lowe’s).
• Three black bricks to give the internal pot even more height (about $4 at Lowe’s).
• Three glazed plant saucers to stack above the black pot and hold pretty rocks I’ve been collecting for years. Deciding what to use took most of the day. ($47 from Green Thumb Ventura).
• A half-inch titanium drill bit to drill holes in my saucers ($15 at Lowe’s).
• A tube of silicone adhesive and a couple of half-inch clamps to make sure the hose stayed attached ($8 and $5, respectively, at Lowe’s).

The total? About $130, plus a day of wandering around garden centers fretting about what saucers and pots to choose and how to stack them.

The hardest part was drilling holes in the middle of the glazed saucers. You must drill slowly to avoid cracking or chipping the ceramic plates and spray the surface frequently with water so it doesn’t get too hot.

When the holes were drilled and the fountain was assembled, it weighed a ton, even without water. (Pro tip: Do your assembling where you plan to keep the fountain, or be sure you have a dolly or Hercules to move it.)

Finally, with the reservoir filled with water, I plugged in the pump and stood over my creation with bated breath. I expected to see a gently gurgling fountain. I had purchased a submersible recirculating water pump that moves 880 gallons per hour — I reasoned that bigger was better, right?

Wrong. After a few seconds I was hit full force by an 8-foot-tall geyser, and there wasn’t any lever on the pump that reduced the force. In desperation I piled some bigger rocks on top of the spout, which forced the water into submission. I’m hoping the rocks will keep Old Faithful under control until I can purchase a pump that only moves about 100 gallons per hour.

At long last, however, I went to sleep listening to the soothing babble of running water outside my bedroom window. And I dreamed about using that 880-gallon-per-hour pump to create a little waterfall and pond in my front yard.

It’s no secret that we live in an age of near-constant digital distractions. Between texts, direct messages, push alerts and other diversions and interruptions, it can be really hard to focus and get stuff done.

However, some folks are using their digital devices to increase their focus and productivity — borrowing a technique often used by people with ADHD. Real-time videos of people studying, working or cleaning are getting tens of millions of views.

Back when Jen Simon of South Orange, N.J., was a teenager, she and her sister both struggled with getting things done.

“My mom figured out my sister had undiagnosed ADHD,” Simon says, “and she figured out some hacks — before they were called hacks — to work with my sister. When she had to do something like clean her room or put away her clothes or whatever it was, my mom would sit with her. She would sit with me often too.”

A few months back, Simon found herself with a load of paperwork she had been putting off. She recalled her mom’s technique and put out a call on Facebook asking for a friend or two to do the same: just come sit with her as she tackled her mission.

It was then that Simon learned that her mom’s old hack now has a name: body doubling. “It works really well for me,” Simon says. She now uses it with her own kids too.

The magic of another person’s presence

Experts say that body doubling is a really effective technique. Even if someone is just sitting nearby doing their own thing while we are working, it seems to spark us into action.

Dr. Edward Hallowell is a psychiatrist and the author of more than 20 books, many of them about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

“People with ADHD find body doubling unusually helpful because we — I have the condition myself — we respond magically to the presence of another person,” he says. “Just having another person nearby activates a kind of attention, imagination, creativity, that is dormant when we’re all by ourselves, usually.”

Body doubling has become wildly popular among folks with ADHD and those who struggle with what professionals call “executive functioning” — the many mental steps we all go through to plan, focus on tasks and accomplish our goals.

(According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 7 million children in the U.S. between the ages of 3 and 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2022; a global study published in 2023 estimates that about 3% of adults worldwide live with ADHD.)

Author Jessica McCabe, creator of the popular YouTube channel How to ADHD.

Anastasia Tsioulcas/NPR

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Anastasia Tsioulcas/NPR

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Author Jessica McCabe runs a popular YouTube channel called How to ADHD. She also calls body doubling an effective strategy.

For example, McCabe says, “I stayed with a friend who has ADHD and who was really struggling to clean her house. So we played a game. I would hold up a couple of items, and she was the one who had to decide where it would go. But I would give her choices: ‘Should this go in the kitchen, under the sink? Should this go in your bedroom, in a drawer? Should it go on top of my head?’”

It was very playful, McCabe says, but it still helped her friend break things down.

“Before, she was really overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to figure out where things went,” McCabe observes, “because there were just too many cognitive steps. Splitting that cognitive load can be incredibly helpful and make tasks that were a real challenge easy for us.”

McCabe says this is active body doubling — having someone participate in your task. But there’s passive body doubling too — like Simon’s mom sitting with her. In a funny way, many of us have practiced this for years. Maybe you go to a coffee shop to get some work done, or you go to a library to study: All those people sitting around you in those public spaces are kind of unwitting witnesses to your productivity.

Online, alone together

Online, people are creating and finding that kind of accountability. Websites and apps now help you find a task buddy. But there’s an even more popular avenue for finding a virtual body double, either pretaped or live: YouTube videos.

On YouTube, many creators are filming themselves studying, working or cleaning in real time; think of their videos as a friend who’s always up for the grind. McCabe says that these videos can provide a gentle form of accountability for the creators.

“If you don’t do the thing, people will know,” she says. “And if you do do the thing, people will know. So you get a little bit of dopamine hit even from that, even from just going, ‘I’m doing a good job and somebody knows that I’m doing a good job.’”

McCabe says this works not just for the person who made the video but also for the people who use the video.

“The person who’s doing the video is not going to know if you’re actually cleaning or not. But there’s still this gentle social pressure of, ‘Oh, I see somebody cleaning. I feel like I should also be cleaning.’”

She says these virtual sessions probably aren’t quite as effective as getting together for real, but they are useful in certain situations: if you have an odd schedule, for example, or if you’re suddenly seized with the energy to tackle something you’ve been ducking, or if you deal with social anxiety. “You might not feel comfortable asking somebody in real life to body-double with you,” she says. “And then it can be really powerful.”

These body-doubling videos — at least hundreds of them are on YouTube — are cumulatively racking up tens of millions of views.

Hallowell says that even though screen usage can of course be isolating, paradoxically, this kind of creative use of videos might just knit us closer together.

“We live in an age of loneliness,” Hallowell observes. “It’s so paradoxical because we’re connected electronically like never before, but we’ve been disconnecting interpersonally. If you create yourself an audience, even though it’s invisible and online, that makes you feel less lonely. That’s very energizing.”

“It’s not just accountability — it’s imagining an audience,” he adds. “When I write books, I have an audience in mind. And that makes me do much better than if I was just writing for the darkness of the universe.”

Both McCabe and Hallowell say that the technique of body doubling — whether in person or virtual — can help all kinds of people, not just those who have been diagnosed with ADHD and executive-functioning issues.

In an era when we all tend to be at least a little bit distracted a lot of the time, body doubling can help keep us all on track. And maybe try turning off all those phone alerts too.