Here’s another pic from the ”five years on” series and as you can see it’s a garden pond with a path around it (and a new fence that needs some protection!).
Five years ago when we moved in it weren’t so clear, we couldn’t even walk down the garden because of the undergrowth so it came as a shock to find that we even had a pond. It was full of dirty water, the result of ten years of debris and as stagnant as anything, the soil surrounding it was grey and compacted with lots of ground elder, bindweed and a large pyracantha gone crazy.
Before clearing, we had to chop down a couple of very tall self-seeded conifers with help of a mate (thanks Marc!) and rather than waste the wood we used it to put around the flower beds. When I first cleared the area I just threw a lot of woody stuff on the compost heap in desperation hence the first heap full of material that hasn’t rotted down and now needs to be burnt. A lesson well learnt!
It took me a whole saturday afternoon in the late autumn to clear out the pond and a couple of baths to get rid of the stench of ten years worth of decomposing debris. When I finished, I stuck a taurpaulin over it so it would stay dry as I was going to fill it in a couple of weeks later. Weeks turned into Months and it was only when I was showing some friends of ours around in the spring (hi Chris and Anu!) they lifted up the taurpaulin and said had we put this over the pond to keep the tadpoles warm. What tadpoles? The pond had filled itself up again (god knows how as it’s a submerged metal tank!) and was teeming with wildlife. There was no way I could filled that in with all that going on, hence the decision of keeping the pond.
Weeds up to me knees 