Finishing The Pond
Howdee! Last weekend was all about the allotment, with another great couple of shifts put in as part of the winter project work. For this post though, it's all about the pond. In my last post, I went through how the basic pond was put together, but that was only part 1 of the job. You can't just dig a hole, line it with plastic and expect to have an instant pond. Well, I suppose any hole in the ground filled with water could be classed as a pond, but that's not my point. In my case it still needed finishing off.
Despite the pond being plastic lined, I wanted to try and make it look at least vaguely natural, so I needed to do a better job of hiding the lie around the edge. So, off to a local hardware shop to get myself 3 bags of pebbles and then to the local nursery to get some plants to help bring some colour and provide cover for pond dwelling wildlife and insects.
3 Bags of pebbles didn't really go that far, but they did everything I needed. I've arranged some around the edges of the pond liner to try and hide some of that, and then dropped some into the deepest part of the pond (which is only around 30cm deep) so any little critters can find somewhere to hide. It's important with a wildlife pond to make access out of the water easy for anything that accidentally falls in, or jumps in but needs to get out. Some people leave a piece of wood to form a ramp, but I just created a gentle bank of pebbles.
For the planting, I thought it would be good to introduce some colour. The local nursery was selling off their stock as it was their last weekend before they shut down for winter, so I bought a tray of wall flowers and two grasses to plant up around the edges. I also wanted to add some plant life into the pond itself to try and help with oxygen levels in the water, but when I went looking in a garden centre for a suitable plant, I was told that they stop selling them this time of year because everything dies back for the winter, and that they would start selling again in the late spring. But then, an allotment neighbour came to the rescue and said that I could help myself to some of the more prolific Elodea Densa plants she had in her pond, which was incredibly kind of her. I loosely tide them into a small bunch, and weighed them down with some stone in the bottom of an old plant pot.
One last rummage around before calling the pond project complete, and I found a bag of crocosmia bulbs that had been given to me a few weeks ago. They needed to get planted now, at this time of year, so they are also spaced along the one side of the pond too. They will be taller that the wall flowers once they grow and develop, so will create a height variance and bold colour to work alongside the wall flowers too. I can't wait to see what it looks like in 6 months time after everything has had change to settle in.
