A big shout out to Ellie who came to us for the weekend for a break from uni and ended up helping us to clear out our rather stinky ponds!

Both were utterly overgrown, there was so much root and stone in each that there was hardly any room for water! Ellie and I nearly broke our backs tugging at matted roots and heaving them, all soggy and smelly out of the pond and into the compost heap.

On more than one occasion the roots gave way and we ended up sat on our bums in the mud – not very pleasant but pretty funny!

One of the ponds has a hard plastic liner which seems to be in fairly good condition, but the other was lined with plastic sheet which needed replacing. We’ve used a thicker plastic liner this time, and added an underlay on top of the (mainly disintegrated) carpet we found under the old pond.

Ellie (a biology student) is keen that we keep one of the ponds natural and unfiltered for the local wildlife and I’d like fish in the other, so it needed a pump. We also needed to find plants, but as the local garden centres all seem to have had no luck with their lily pads this year we raided my Grandad’s pond for a few – thanks Grandad!

Our local stones that we were using around the ponds seem to crack in half when there is frost, so we’ve roped David’s parents into bringing us Cornish stones whenever they visit. We’ve just about finished edging both ponds now…

There is still more to do – we want to cover that area where the black plastic killing off weeds at the moment, and we want to do more planting up around the ponds, but are waiting to see what comes through this year first. We’ll post again on stage two of the pond refurb in a couple of months!

(And yes… Ellie did do plenty of relaxing too, we don’t invite her over just for the free labour :p)