The Cottage Smallholder

Pond

We have two ponds at the cottage. One circular six foot pond that is called imaginatively “The Small Pond”. I actually installed this pond myself with the help of John Coe – he bedded it on sand as my attempt was a bit wobbly. The other pond is a semi circular pond 28’ by about 14’ at its biggest point. No prizes to guess its name – it’s called “The Big Pond”.

This was made when I’d been living in the cottage for about a year. Before I moved here I wasn’t very keen on ponds but there was a small pond in the garden. I secretly planned to get rid of it but didn’t tell the seller who was immensely proud of his hand dug pond and eclectic collection of fish.

I moved in and within a week or so I was hooked. Ponds are soothing, waterfalls diffuse irritating noise with their own particular sonorous splash. Fish turned out to be far more interesting than I ever thought possible. The next spring the old pond was choc a bloc like a rush hour train with fish. I decided to make a much bigger pond and that is how The Big Pond was born.

I didn’t dig TBP myself. A team of men arrived to dig it by hand as even a mini digger couldn’t access the back garden.  They dealt with the ants and the stones and they endlessly complained apart from the times when they were drinking freshly brewed tea and coffee.

The fish were contained in a makeshift pond made with straw bales and builder’s plastic. The water was moved from the old pond to the temporary home using the old cottage guttering that had been replaced. Magic. How I wish now that I’d kept that guttering – handy for peas and guttering on greenhouses, sheds and polytunnels.

I had no idea that ponds attract a vast swathe of wildlife. Birds bathe in the pond, swallows swim through the surface for a quick on the wing shower. Dragon and Damsel flies gestate in the murky depths. Frogs arrive in the spring to provide your garden with a new generation of slug and snail eating friends. If you are lucky, toads will move into your garden and of course there are my favourites – newts. Shy creatures that swim with ‘fingers’ extended like stars.  

Of course fish are interesting to observe. They hint for food and the older ones will fight like tigers not to be caught – sometimes a net has to be deployed if a fish is sick. That was the reason why I got The Small Pond – it’s cheaper to treat 100 litres of water than 22,000 litres.

The Big Pond was my pride and joy. A haven for wildlife. A place to relax and watch the fish schmoozing. And all the positive ions from the water fall. Perfect.

About five years ago a heron used our pond as a winter restaurant. Gradually he picked off every fish. It took some time. We believed that we had so many wily fishy friends that some would survive. But the next spring not a single fish appeared. Disaster.

Since then we’ve let the pond go wild. We still ate beside it on warm evenings. Pond plants and aerators gradually covered most of the surface. It became a deck for bathing birds. Coach loads of frogs and newts arrived to join the normal number of residents. Birds nested in the reeds. At the end of the summer the lawn was covered with teeny baby frogs that had hatched without the hordes of fish to deplete their numbers.

Last autumn we decided that in the spring we’d finally clean out the pond and introduce new fish, get the pump working again and cut back the irises that have taken over a third of the pond. February is the ideal time to tackle this job before the arrival of the frogs for their annual Bacchanal.

I’ve been clearing the silt from the bottom of the pond for three weeks now. This is marvellous compost for the garden. Two large two handled trugs of the stuff, lifted with a hefty net, fill the builder’s wheelbarrow. And then the wheelbarrow and I catapult down the garden at speed to sluice this on the borders. Dark, fen like goodness.

Then I started to get tired of this heavy work. If I drained a lot of the water the silt would not be so heavy to lift out as I could actually get in the pond with a bucket. The super duper pond pump was apparently dead. I found a tiny pump in the barn – it fizzled out after three hours – if it had been up to the mark it would have taken ten days to drain the pond! Perhaps it overheard me telling Danny about its prospective workload.

To be continued….