Pond Life

This page shows how our garden has ‘grown’ over the time we have been working on it.

The Old Pond

The BIG feature of the garden was the pond.
We knew the pond had been neglected by the previous owners of the house and had been told there was no life in the pond. Except the abundance of lily.

The plan was to ‘shrink’ the pond and turn it into a wildlife pond and hopefully attract some frogs and newts.  A problem soon arose, the pond was not empty. It already had fish, frogs and newts living in it!

Plan B

So plan B came into action. Build a smaller pond opposite the big one for our wildlife pond and worry about filling in the old one when done. The hole on the left of the picture is the beginnings of the new pond.

After some time the new pond was finished and we could drain the old and transfer the few fish and frogs into the new pond.  Suprise number two then came up. In the pond were over 80 tench, 30 newts and I stopped counting the frogs at 50.  New pond was going to be a little small for all those fish, let alone the rest of the wildlife!

The New Pond, with Adam trying to help dig.

Plan C

So Plan C began. The old pond would once again be shrunk two less than half its size and the tench would go back to live in there and hopefully we could persuade the frogs and newts with the right enviroment to live in Pond 1. Still had too many fish, so we managed to persuade my brother (Thanks bro’) to take some for his pond (20 – 30).  Over the winter and with the help of a hungry magpie when the fish were moved into pond 2 there was just over 30 of them.

They are now happily enjoying life in there new filtered pond that is complete with running water. Didn’t think a fish could look happy but they do. The tench are a boring browny green and difficult to see when swimming near the bottom so we have added some colour, Koi, Goldfish & Shubunkin and some other fishes, I’ve forgotten the names of already. 12 new fishes to enjoy our pond and add some colour.

Still work to do but it’s getting there.

Next few days I’ll take and upload some photo’s of the progress.

The next project is a proper pathway between the two ponds. This will be slightly raised and extend just over the edges of each pond giving the impression it is a bridge. Going to be an interesting project and one that will take some work.

Once this is done the rest of the garden will transform bit by bit out from this point. A growing project that I am sure is going to take us some years to complete!

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