I made my first pond back in the 90’s. It was late summer, the weather was hot and the ground was dry, ground that was sunbaked clay. I remember toiling with a pickaxe to break up the soil before I could even begin to dig it out. The pond was shaped like a figure eight, two bowl-shaped depressions, overlapping. Once the holes had been lined with sand and underlay the butyl liner was put in place before the pond was filled using a hosepipe. It sounds so simple now, yet given the conditions at the time it was back-breaking work. The new pond was edged with turf, planted up and stocked with a few fish and so I had completed my first pond.
I got a huge amount of pleasure from simply sitting and watching what was happening in, on and around the water. Frogs and newts came to the pond, as did a multitude of insects. Damselflies started laying their eggs within days of the pond being finished and one day a few months later I spotted a heron and then most of the fish were gone.
I moved house in 2001 and ever since it was inevitable that some day I would build another pond. Once I had made the decision to make my current garden more wildlife friendly, a pond was always going to be part of the new design.
I set about marking and digging out the pond over the course of the last week of October 2020. This time the problem was not digging the out pond but rather the lack of space to put the spoil. As a result much of the excavated soil was double-handled but despite this the pond quickly took shape, avocado shape. I put the subsoil back into the lowest part of the pond and into the depressions I had added so that later on I would be able to plant directly into the silt. Finally a week after I started to dig out the pond I was able to start filling it, using a hose placed in a bucket so as to minimise the disturbance of the soil in the base of the pond. Once filled all that remained was to landscape the edges with cobbles and dead wood and then to plant it up.
Coming up in part 2 of Pond Life - Planting up the Pond