The Makeover: creating clean planting beds

If you want to add marginal grasses and emrgent plants to a concrete, vertical sided, pond you need a planting beds with a suitable rooting medium.

To keep pollutants out, stay well clear of soil or compost. The answer is clean washed sand – we used play pit sand.

For the makeover we made three new planting beds.

The Makeover – from ornamental garden pond to clean-water wildlife pond

Andy and Chris removing the accumulated sediment

To get the pond off to a good start we removed all the sediment and existing plants – most of which were non-natives.

It all went to the compost heap – there’s nothing wrong with having this stuff on the garden.

I wanted to get all the existing nutrient supply out of the pond in preparation for adding the rain water, including the sediment under the clumps of plants.

And then we really did scrub this pond out like a bath – it even has a plughole!

What we’ve actually got is a 1.5 by 2.5 m pond, just 30 cm deep, an excellent depth for a wildlife pond.

It’s a good start.

Next: on to the water and the plants.

The makeover begins

Down to London with a van full of water (just over a ton) and native wild plants, including some rescued from the local stream where they’ll otherwise be hoiked out later in the year and dumped on the bank, to stop flooding.

A pond makeover

Time for a makeover: turning an ordinary garden pond into a clean-water wildlife pond

Our back garden is full of buckets and barrels of rainwater as we prepare to do a makeover this week of a famous garden pond.

We’re starting from scratch, turning what’s just an ordinary concrete-lined, tap-water filled garden pond into a more wildlife friendly clean-water pond.

Where are we? The clue is in the footprints and pawprints in the concrete next to the pond.

Emerging Large Red Damselfly

Large Red Damselflies beginning to emerge today; this one from the stonewort tub. Next to it is the empty skin (known to dragonfly aficionados as an exuvium)

 

Frog amongst the mosses

Tonight we found five frogs in the pond: two adults and three young ones, still only half grown. Maybe some of our own from last year.

What not to dig

If you look around the web at advice on making wildlife ponds you might think something like this was ideal, with different water depths and ‘shallow’ shelves for planting. Although it looks quite neat and tidy, ponds like this are too steep-sided and too deep to create the best wildlife habitat. The shape always reminds me of one of those giant open-cast mines.

Most people giving advice on how deep to dig a wildlife pond make their ponds too deep. I heard someone on the telly the other day say the depth they were aiming for was up to a child’s waist.

So I measured Katy’s 7 year old waist – 70 cm from the ground. Roughly twice as deep as the deepest area of my pond, twice as deep as it needs to be.

Ponds like this won’t be lifeless, especially if you are scrupulous about clean water. Practically any shape of hole in the ground will be a good wildlife habitat if you can keep the pollutants out. But natural ponds this size are rarely so deep or steep sided.

Digging down deep also makes it impossible to create the very gently shelving shallows where most wildlife lives.

A better shape which overcomes these problems is shown in the photo sequence for my new pond. Though we’re still learning: I expect people will improve on my designs.

Large Red Damselfies are starting to emerge

Down at Frog End in Devon, the first Large Red Damselflies are out now.

In my pond the larvae are nearly ready to emerge – you can see the red of the adult body through the larval skins.

Last year I saw my first on 9th May – so should be any time now.

The Wacky Races

 

Thanks to Jo’s mum for the picture of the unlikely threesome of frog, fish and grass snake.

Goldfish feel pain: the Telegraph

 

Even tough guys feel pain

As we get to know more about animals we usually find they share more and more of our own characteristics.

Here’s a story in that long tradition.

Fluffy comments on the new pond