The pond

It's something I never realised when we moved into this house. But ponds can take a lot of work, not to mention money. The idea was, we move in and just leave the pond as a feature. I assumed (incorrectly as it turned out) that the people who used to live here would take any fish they had with them. After all, they are a kind of a pet.  I was wrong!

So we have a pond with between 20 and 20 fish (impossible to cound because of the green water). The state the pond was in meant that action had to be taken very quickly; unfortunatelly we lost two fish in the first three weekends. After some research into the problems and possible solutions, the best options would be to empty, clean and refill the pond. I figured, if I was going to all that trouble, I would buy new underlay and new liner and make the thing bigger as well. So that's exactly what I did.

The starting condition. Note how green it the water is. Also the two green lines going into the pond from the bottom of the picture are two air hoses. I had to get some oxygen into the pond and that seemed the best way.

Here you can see the amount of vegetation in the water. It had gone mad. Note that if you look carefully you can just see part of a water lilly trying to grow out of the masses of "water soliders".

So first I had to sort the fish and the water lilly. Fish went into temporary accomodation and the lilly seemed quite happy in a bin.

I dug out the new pond shape, twice the size of the old one.

That all happened last year and now, it is time to sort the pond out. I started with the job of getting all of the soil out of the way and making the edge nice. The idea being to ensure that water doesn't run-off the garden into the pond. The next steps will be to add in a waterfall, finish the beach and get some edging stones.

At this stage of things, the waterfall is in a position that seems fine. It's already bedded in, but needs finishing. The beach has all of the main stones in place, just needs the smaller stones to fill the gaps and make it look more natural. So now the edge stones just need to be chosen and we are done.