Pond life

Ask me some years ago how I felt about garden ponds and I would have been ambivalent - not really my thing. However, when, a little over two years ago, we set up our mini-pond on a purely functional basis (to attract toads to eat the slugs that eat our cultivated mushrooms), and filled it with aquatic plants and a couple of goldfish, it looked so pretty that it seemed a shame to have it so far from the house and out of view.

Pond v 1.0.

We came up with various plans to build another pond closer to the house, but they pretty much fell by the wayside as other jobs muscled their way to the top of the priority list - until a couple of months ago. Back in the summer we paid a visit to our friends Gianni and Serena, who have no fewer than 4 ponds in various spots around their outdoor space. Visiting them and seeing the beautiful aquatic plants that were growing in their ponds, as well as the mesmerising fish and the gentle sound of the trickle of water on a hot summer's day renewed our enthusiasm and our resolve to create another pond. And, with a birthday gift from my dear Dad to spend, I decided that putting it towards a pond would be a great thing to do.

And so it began.

First, we identified the location for the new pond - the scruffy area at the end of the house on which there once stood a sort of agricultural extension to the house (what we believe would have been the metato, or chestnut house), and which has been awaiting a full tidy-up for the last 6 years.

To begin with, I made a half-hearted attempt at starting to dig down to create a cavity for an in-ground pool, but due to the fact that this area has for the last six years been the dumping ground for all forms of building rubble, on top of the fact that our land is naturally packed full of stones, digging seemed like a lost cause. It wasn't long before Stuart came up with a new idea: an above ground pond built using gabion cages.

And so I spent my birthday money on 10 gabion cages. When they arrived, despite being a long way off ready to start constructing the pond, we got one out of the box to see how it fitted together. We were mightily impressed with the ingenuity of the kit - simple but effective engineering:

We finally started construction of the pond at the beginning of October - when temperatures were much more favourable for working in and when my office workload had reverted to more reasonable levels. 

We started by levelling off the ground and adding a couple of gabions and filling them, little by little, with stones. 

As the ground sloped away, we had to prop up the gabions with other rocks to achieve a level surface.

After about 4 half-days of work, we had filled all the gabions and had the perimeter of the pond ready. We managed to fill all of them with stone that was just lying around - a large amount came from the car park area, a couple of wheel-barrowfuls came from along the drive and the upper donkey track, and a tractor load came from the grassy patch by our gates that the wild boar had usefully dug up (not a phrase you hear very often) some months ago.

In the next step, we lined the entire inside area with pieces of insulation foam - the idea being to try to prevent any jagged edges puncturing the liner under the weight of the water.

When we had done that, we laid the thick plastic liner in... and started to add water.

We began with a bit of mains water, just to see how things would go, but as soon as we were satisfied that the liner was doing its job we switched to using the water from our rain water collection tanks. It took a few days, but it got there eventually and we were even able to test the overflow mechanism that Stuart had put in, which worked perfectly.

Next, in went some plants - some lilies and water hyacinths donated to us by Gianni and Serena, and a few other plants that we took cuttings from (split) from our mini-pond.

Once the pond was full, we were able to trim the liner from the edges, attaching it to the gabions with short sections of water pipe to act as clips, and arranging stones along the edges to make it look more aesthetically pleasing.

Next came the addition of a pump to help oxygenate the water. We toyed with the idea of buying a fountain (a spitting frog? a weeing cherub?) but in the end came up with our own creation using a curved terracotta roof tile.

The next addition to the pond had to be fish. We had originally planned to introduce mosquitofish, reasoning that they would help with the mosquito problem in the summer months, but after having read various articles suggesting that they may have a detrimental effect on biodiversity (essentially eating everything in sight, including amphibian eggs), and that they are not even very effective against the tiger mosquitoes that we are plagued with in our area (because, rather than laying their eggs in larger bodies of water such as ponds, tiger mosquitoes prefer to opt for much smaller accumulations of water, such as the water that collects in an upturned saucer, or a tire or the lip of a downpipe), we decided against that particular species and to concentrate instead on the less destructive goldfish.

We paid a visit to the aquarium section of the local pet shop and, after telling the assistant about our pond set-up, and being advised which fish would be suitable, we left with six goldfish and two koi carp.

After the required 45 minutes of floating the fish inside their plastic bags of pet-shop tank water in the pond (to acclimatise them to the temperature of the pond water) we excitedly added them to the pond, only for each of them to swim out of the bag and promptly disappear to the murky depths. We did wonder if we had just spent a load of money with nothing to show!

A few days later we had a delivery of oxygenating plants via the post lady (ordered from the internet), and we spent an afternoon potting them up and sinking them into the pond - most of them (Persicaria amphibia, Butomus umbellatus, Elodea canadensis and Ceratophyllum demersum) are either fully or partially submerged, so for the moment at least there is nothing to show! 

And so after a few short weeks, our pond is now fully functioning, supporting plant life, fish life, water snails, and already attracting dragon flies and other visiting winged insects. We are really pleased with the addition to our property - pleased for the increase in biodiversity we've already started to see, as well as more pleased than we even imagined we would be with the tranquility of the spot and the fascination of what goes on in the water. We are addicted to going outside to look for fish (all of which, after an initial week of shyness, have started to swim close enough to the surface for us to spot them) and just to stand and listen to the trickle of the running water.