What’s the right time to make a new pond?

Pond 3: Katy's Pond (you can see the 'Old Pond' in the background and the 'New Pond' is to the left, out of view)

What’s the right time to make a new pond?

The simple answer is: anytime!

And that’s what we did last weekend.

It’s called Katy’s pond, and is pond number three in our garden. So now we have a ‘pond complex’.

A pond complex is simply a group of ponds, fairly close together, which provide a wider variety of habitat than a similar area of water in one pond would.

In the countryside we recommend always making groups of ponds rather than single ponds – and there’s no reason why the same thing shouldn’t be true in the garden.

It’s rather what the most natural wetlands are like – with groups of waterbodies close together of different sizes, shapes, depths and degrees of permanence – separated by patches of dry land.

It's a small hole - digging only took a couple of hours - here I am cutting under the turf so we can tuck the liner in

We used some offcuts of liner for an underlay

Katy trimmed the underlay

We laid the liner in place

Then we filled the pond

And in one afternoon the whole thing was finished.

The next day: Katy's not quite as gloomy about it as she looks! Actually on Monday she went straight into the garden when she got home from school to see how the pond was getting on.

Katy’s pond is our smallest (1 m x 2 m) and shallowest so far: with a maximum depth of about 10 cm it’s safe for all but the very youngest children. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops compared to our bigger ponds.

We put it in an afternoon (though we did have the basic outline of the hole dug already).