I decided at the weekend that it was time to clean out and refresh Tiny Pond, the main reason being that I suspect that water has been slowly leaking out. During the dry weeks I wasn’t surprised but, once it started to rain heavily again, the level still seemed to be dropping. Of course, it could be the pigeons who seem to enjoy splashing about and leaving their foot marks on the stepping stones. In fact we have a range of quite big birds, even ravens, who might be taking advantage of a handy bathtub. Still, in any case, it was getting rather murky and a bit too full of gravel that I’d added from time to time.
The first step was to drain and remove the contents. For this task, I inflated a small paddling pool and put that in a spare space in the yard. Then I removed the plants from Tiny Pond and pruned them fairly radically before relocating them to the children’s pool. The water spearmint, for example, had taken over the pond with twisted shoots and far-reaching roots. A good haircut was overdue.
Along with the plants, I also transferred at least four small newts, two enormous fat tadpoles that will never turn into froglets now, a couple of backswimmers, a few pond snails, and a dozen or so creatures that I couldn’t identify at first but turned out to be dragonfly nymphs. I had to make sure they had somewhere to burrow and hide, now I’d mostly got rid of the thick mud they were in. I added some of the stones and washed gravel for hiding and resting places.
I looked carefully through anything I was planning to compost for wildlife and rescued quite a few, leaving the rest to drain on the pond side so anything I’d missed could crawl out to safety.
Here’s the pond being drained. I kept a few cleanish bucketfuls for the paddling pool, to maintain a similar temporary environment but distributed most of it around the garden. It was dark and sludgy and probably fully of nutrients for my plants but I wanted to start again with clean rainwater from the butts. So, as I removed each bucketful, I used my fishing net to strain the water for wildlife.
Here’s the pond with that task completed, with old liner removed and buckets of pond gravel saved for washing. You can see the before and after buckets, with the gravel looking much brighter and ready to be used again. You can also see the evidence of burrowing creatures that I found when I lifted the liner.
I was just about to order some new pond liner when John showed me some tough plastic sheeting he’d bought to cover a large hole in our sitting room wall. We’ve removed a set of full length doors which now led to nowhere, due to our recent remodelling of the terrace area. The wall was partially filled with new bricks but was waiting for a new window to arrive. Boarded up on the outside, the the plastic sheeting was doing a great job of keeping the dust off the furniture inside and, as it happens, looked tough enough for pond liner. This was fortunate because John had bought a complete roll of the stuff because it worked out cheaper and it was now taking up space in the garage.
After a bit of extra digging and shaping to create slightly wider and flatter shelves for planting, I installed the pond liner roughly over the bare earth where the pond had been and it moulded to shape quickly due to the weight of the water and clean gravel. At this point, I returned some of the water and all of the plants from the paddling pool too, but it was 8pm by then and too dark to continue, so I left it overnight to settle in.
The next step was to start the process of edging the pond with slabs so that I could walk around the edge for maintenance and to reach the overhanging fig tree, and so the grandchildren could have a safe viewing platform for pond dipping. The slabs would also hide the pond liner. Here’s the next stage almost completed, with some liner still to be cut to shape, some slabs in place and just a few more to position. The result should be quite a lot safer than the old configuration which had the slabs sloping too much towards the water (See Blog 52).
And, after a little more shaping of the soil around the pond and a little more scissor-work with the pond liner, the almost final result.
Here’s the renewed pond. I’ve just left a little fringe of pond liner showing. Hopefully the planting will grow and spread to hide this although I may do some further trimming. The plan is to keep this if possible to make sure there are minimal leakages, reducing the need to top it up too regularly. At first, I wondered why I was bothering with the refresh, because it was quite a lot of heavy lifting and digging to achieve it. But, now it’s done, I’m really happy with it.
FROG BLOG 