The Pond in our garden, lovingly dug by ourselves over a month back in 1994, has been a source of delight, amusement, education, frustration and calm contemplation over the years. Many a cup of coffee has been drunk while sitting watching the wildlife it attracts. An emerging dragonfly was the inspiration for the design of a cake during my City and Guild Design course back in 1998. Grandchildren and friends children have sat on the little bridge over the stream with their noses a few inches from the water looking at frogs, tadpoles, beetles, dragonflies and even a snake.
Over the years the vegetation in and around the pond has grown increasingly luxurious. Each spring and it becomes more dense and each Autumn we struggle to reduce it.
This summer though we have had increasing problems with it. A pump failure in mid summer started the catalogue of woes. The pump wouldn't come out of the water. The water lily roots had escaped their container and trapped the electric cable to the pump. The only option was to destroy the beautiful waterlily to be able to lift the pump. Sorting out the pump made us realise that a deep cleaning operation was required to remove the silt and dead alga. We also became aware we had a water leak. Over the sumer we tried different strategies to try and define which part of the pond the leak was in.
By Autumn we decided their was no option but to drain and clean the pond out and hopefully find and rectify the leak.
Himself set to work draining the water levels to make catching the fish easier. Ha!!! The fish thought otherwise and did their best to evade the net. Three tubs of fish sat on the patio. Had he caught them all? Eventually the silt in the water was so dense he had to give up until the next day to give it time to settle.
It looked an extremely sad sight. Still no indication of were the leak is yet.
Next morning there had been a frost the temperature recorded -2 degrees when I got up. The fish in the tubs hadn't appeared to have suffered any ill effects. The water left in the pond had settled somewhat and it was obvious that there were still fish to catch!
I set about catching the remaining fish, not easy, the mud soon stirred up and they came up in the net along with masses of smelly mud and I had to get them out quickly and into fresh water. Thank god for rubber gloves!
Power washing the sides to clean it the pond liner showed up our leaking problems. The liner was deteriorating and splitting. It shouldn't be, it was guaranteed for many more years yet. Now we need to decide what's to be done. Neither of us have the energy or strength to completely remake the whole pond and with last nights frost it's not the time to be doing a job like that. We decided to finish cleaning it out and refill to the split line, replace the fish until the spring.
Now, no one has ever fallen in, not even the grandkids, as I designed it to be as child safe as possible, but, while trying to remove some roots from the side 'Himself' slipped in. He was not best pleased. God that mud does smell!!! Hopefully that will be the last of our woes but the saga will continue
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