My wife and son regularly catch tadpoles at the pond and bring them home to grow in a large bin we keep in the yard. They would get excited to see them mature and eventually hop away. Last year a couple of jays figured out that our frog bin was an easy buffet. Oh, the drama!
Uh oh!
When I was a kid we had a seasonal pond near the house that would be loaded with tadpoles of spade foot toads. No frogs near us, darn it. My sis and I would get loads of them and keep them in big porcelain pans full of water in the basement. Out of hundreds only a few ever grew to have four legs and no tail. :(
Ironically the best food we found for them was lettuce. Bits of lettuce in the water would rot around the edges and the tadpoles would eat that. So I guess frogs in lettuce is not so strange after all. heh heh
I’ve done that several times over the years. Scoop up tadpoles out of the ditches in the rainy season, grow them in a big square plastic container in the garden, watch them turn into cute little froggies and hop away. They hang around for generations and eat the bugs that would eat your veggies. I don’t have to worry about the birds snacking out on them, because the feral cats around here keep the birds up in the high trees. Except for the egrets and the hawks, of course. An egret can get as tall as four feet, and we’ve got plenty of them. The egrets corner the cats and peck them, and often hurt them badly. The hawks just carry them off, tear them up and eat them. Just like they do the squirrels and field rats around here. And occasionally, somebody’s expensive little yappy dog.