Daily Archives: May 3, 2021

The ones that got away

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And as the wind and rain lashes against the back window here in south London on a May Bank Holiday Monday evening here’s some pics from our pond project that got away so to speak.

Firstly (above) the ton of sludge at the bottom of the pond that has now been distributed around the back garden and being washed into the soil as we write. When we looked into our empty garden pond we were reminded of one of our favourite places in London The Strand Lane “Roman” Bath (below) which is basically an old water tank too. More details about that wonderful place of “Antiquity” here.

When all gets back to some sort of normality it’s a place worth visiting perhaps just once. You can’t see anything at all through the dirty viewing window and if you are lucky to go inside, the smell of damp and lack of anything to actually capture your imagination will drive you out after five minutes. As a certain John Lydon (possibly) sang about the place once “The side of London that the tourists never see”.

And (below) the great piece of carpet underlay that was sitting on top of the skip when we walked back from the local shop with a cheap bucket and two pairs of long armed washing up gloves. It’s all about “keeping ’em peeled” as Shaw Taylor used to say combined with the old “make do with what you got” Punk maxim!

And now the end is near

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The job is near enough done! Apart from the last bit of smoothing out of the sides and cutting off the excess pond liner below the broken slabs, that’s it. The fish and the newts are back in, they’ve been fed and getting to know their new abode after being manhandled by the “Giant pink hands from the dry” (thanks to our good mate Marc b who coined this apt phrase.)

It looks though we’re in for some rain this evening and there’s a fair bit of wind about too. The rain will be good for the pond and the rest of the garden that is looking parched. And we’ve got a loads of silt and stuff that we added to the flowerbeds. Judging by the look of the stuff from the bottom of the pond it just has to be good for the garden (we hope!)

Have a good rest of the bank holiday!

But we’re absolute beginners

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We took the plunge yesterday (rubbish pun intended) and made a start on clearing out the leaking pond and the mammoth task of putting in a new plastic liner.

After a couple of weeks of putting the job off after receiving some great advice from the staff at Shannon’s, we purchased the liner online (making sure we had a bit of excess around the pool in our calculations), got ourselves some trugs (Cheers Marc B!), some B&Q 99p buckets and chose yesterday as the day of reckoning.

In the morning a couple of pairs of long washing up gloves and another bucket was purchased from the local shop where we received some good luck from the shopkeeper when he learned what we were doing. On the way back from the said shop we found some carpet underlay in a skip which came in very handy too, especially on the very rough top of the old water tank which the water sits in. Once there would have been pond liner separating the rusty tank and the water but that’s not around today and that’s the problem. The water had a tinge of orange some days and was slowly losing water.

First thing was to take everything off the side, the broken slabs, plants, netting and what have you and it was time to drain out the pond by hand using buckets and the fish removed using an old kid’s fishing net from a seaside trip many many moons ago. The fish (and some newts) went in the buckets and trugs and any excess water and silt sludge went on the garden after being passed through an old cullender just in case there were any wildlife in the murky liquid. As we came to the end we were using jam jars to fill the bucket and a sophisticated dam system (a load of old housebricks) which worked. Talk about a sigh of relief and a big cheer when we got to the bottom!

After a break for lunch we laid the pond liner underlay over a thin layer of sand and over the carpet underlay that went around the top edge and some of the sides. The liner finally went on, placing it central to the pond leaving all of the excess which we’ll fiddle with today. The water was hose-piped in and we’ll have to wait at least 24 hours before the fish go back.

To be continued…

And to spur us on to the next part of the job this morning here’s a pond themed tune!