The Pond is Finished!

The biggest news by far from this camp over this bright, warm, windless Bank Holiday, is that we have finished the pond! We got stuck in well today trimming and burying the edges of the rubber sheet, determined to create a variety of types of bank. A long stretch of the 'south' side is down to grass, so we simply lifted a wedge of turf with the fattest edge 'inland' and laid the rubber over a soil 'lip' at roughly water level.

We hope (and we have found on previous ponds) that the thick inner edge gives enough hydraulic connection to the surrounding soil to stop the turf drying out - we want grass growing right to the edge and dangling over into the water to give cover for and access to newts, frogs and invertebrates. At the 'west' end we have a shelf for our marginal plants (purple loosestrife, king-cup etc) and the grass margin is behind this.

Coming round by the 'Darby and Joan' chairs, we change to a line of boulders, many taken from the old 'Albert' cairn you may recall - the pile of boulders dug out of our floor during the house build, and stacked at the end of the front terrace. These stones run round the the 'north' side where we have made a flat-stone gently sloping beach to give easy access to young goslings. In the middle of this, Liz also created a small 'rock pool' which had turned out to be ideal for a special and surprising reason; more of which later.

At the end of this beach we made a headland onto which we carefully put the biggest rock that came out of the pond - the one which broke my first shovel. This is surrounded by smaller stones and is either called 'Howth Head' after the one in Dublin. or the "Hen and Chickens". Beyond that and coming back to the east end are a row of stones which are deliberately slightly lower, with their bases in water and the pond liner rising up behind them to get the right level. Again, this is all about hidey-holes for creepie-crawlies and amphibians.

The whole thing is about 10 m long and 6 m wide and is 22 inches deep at the deepest point. We love it and the geese have adopted it as a favourite place and I have been able to get some nice pictures. We were amazed to find that with this much space to play in the geese's splashing about includes some swimming under water like a penguin! Who knew that they could? They duck their heads and shoulders under then zoom along completely submerged for about 3-4 feet before bobbing to the surface! Liz has this on video. I have not yet been able to capture it on 'still' but I will.

It was during one of these sessions that the goslings discovered that they could keep to the 'rock pool' where it was a lot less wavy. The grown-ups were creating quite a 'chop' in the water and had us re-thinking where it might be wise to try to site water lilies and so on.

So, tonight we are feeling very pleased with ourselves and decided to have a celebratory meal. We had a deep, oven backed 'tortilla' made with goose and hen eggs plus potato and diced chicken. Chilled Prosecco served as our celebration.

Nice pond!

Gardening Blitz

We are on hand to help today in a major gardening blitz, which sees the garden cleared of old, long-since-pecked-clean seed heads and other tall dead stuff, opening up the view and reminding us we actually have a reasonable size garden (25' by 100').

It's long overdue. Mum has pruned the roses and attacked the hollyhocks and old sedum heads etc in the upper "circle" garden, while Dad has cleared Californian poppy and yellow horned poppy foliage, magnolia leaves and died back Erigeron from the gravel out front, plus chopped up the old Christmas tree, and cut away all the sport suckers from the base of the lilac, and the old stems of purple loose strife and asparagus.

Finally they joined up to cut down the tall canes/plumes of the two big ornamental grasses down to 6 inches or so. This act is the real garden opener, because these two tall tufts create a very obvious visible barrier between top garden and what we call the "ha-ha" bank, below which is the pond.

Plenty of time, though, to sit back and chill on the terrace, which was reasonably warm. The pair of robins show their appreciation by swooping down on the disturbed soil and flitting about picking up spring-awakened grubs and creepy crawlies. Mum and Dad are hopeful that the robins will nest.

They tell some awful story of me as a puppy killing a robin which flew into the greenhouse and stunned itself, one of the then breeding pair with a half built nest, which was then abandoned. They have not nested in the garden since. I don't remember this but if it's true then it's probably in this blog somewhere. Think I'd not get away with it again, though, so maybe I'll avoid robins in 2010.

Deefski