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.

 

Family & pizza

The summer of 2020, of course, was very different from previous ones thanks to the global health and travel situation. Locally, we went to fewer village summer festivals (in fact, none - several of them did go ahead, albeit under slightly more restricted conditions than usual, but we didn't go to any), and whereas normally we would have had a stream of visitors throughout the year and especially during the summer (in fact, last year we calculated that we'd had friends/family staying with us for a whopping 104 days of the year), this year we have had only one visit since Stuart's Mum left in January.

That was a very special visit though - Stuart's eldest son, Dean, and his partner, Gavin, came out to meet us and spend a week with us in late August. And what a week it was! We had a wonderful time getting to know them, showing them some of the local sights and introducing them to our way of life and general surroundings. We were overwhelmed by what a great pair of young men they are, we all got on like a house on fire and we spent the whole week laughing and smiling.

Dean and Gavin's visit coincided with one of this year's most exciting material additions to our home: a pizza oven. 

For a long time we had thought about building a traditional style pizza oven, but we knew that - technically, at least - we would need planning permission to do so, and of course it was one of those jobs that would forever be on the would-be-nice-to-do list, being usurped by the absolutely-have-to-do list. Then, this summer, Stuart's mum, Sheila, very kindly gave us a gift that allowed us to consider another option: a pre-made, standalone oven. And so it was that in late July we found ourselves in a very upmarket garden furniture shop ordering a pizza oven!

The oven was delivered by courier during a short period when Stuart was away (of course, it would be!). It was so heavy that the courier struggled to get it out of the back of the van, even using his pallet lifter, but he eventually managed and left it for me (as requested) on the piece of grass next to the gates, and before long the cavalry, aka Paul & Kathy, had arrived to with the moving of it. Paul was game to drive the tractor up to the gates, and then the three of us unpacked the oven from the wooden box and pondered how to get it into the back of the tractor. 

A tardis? No, a pizza oven.

We eventually managed to get it into the tractor, strapped firmly in and Paul very slowly, very gingerly drove it back down the drive, with Kathy and me walking behind ready to catch it (or get squashed by it!) if it wobbled out. We left it in the back of the tractor, reasoning that we would wait until Stuart was back and had come up with a plan for getting it from the car park to its eventual home on the patio outside the house.

And so it was rather fortunate for us that the very next week we had additional pairs of hands available to help in the form of Dean and Gavin. Paul & Kathy also came round for the moving of the pizza oven and between five of us we managed to slowly lift and carry it from the tractor, up the steps to the back of the house, then round to the front. We soon discovered that the spot we had designated for is was too uneven for it to stay safely for the time being, so we moved it onto the gravel area until such time as Stuart could create a level base for it. 

And then we lit it.

We had a great evening christening the pizza oven and taking it in turns to have a go. It worked like a dream.

While the pizza oven is here to stay as a permanent fixture, Dean and Gavin of course had jobs and lives to go back to in the UK, and all too soon our week with them came to an end. We had a fabulous time with them, making some lovely memories, and we can't wait for them to come out and visit us again.

Overdue catch-up part 4: some of the things we've done

And so in this final part of the catch-up series, a look at some of the jobs we've done the last month or so in between the day job (sitting at the computer all day) and chasing rats around.

We've almost finished cutting, splitting and stacking wood for the winter wood pile - the main pile is completed, but the pile of smaller sticks is still only about half done.

We had a lovely day out for our anniversary - a trip to the very quiet Certaldo (a beautiful town about 65km south of us) and a picnic in a quiet square there. We loved it like that, but I'm not sure the restaurant owners would agree. Tourism does seem to be slowly trickling back into our area, so hopefully the local businesses are doing slightly better now and will have enough trade to keep their heads above water.

We dismantled what had become known (between the two of us) as the "orangery" a rather grand name for the structure Stuart had originally put up to protect the citrus plants and other pot plants over winter and which had morphed into a green house for our seedlings and become rather more permanent than was originally intended. However, the citruses were starting to outgrow the structure so we decided it was time to re-locate it. The orange and the lime have been moved to the lawn, against the garden wall, and the orangery (which now no longer has any oranges in it) has been re-constructed at the back of the house.

Where once there was an "orangery", now there is space and a view!

And a new fence to stop people going headfirst onto the guest lawn!

The lime and the orange have been relocated.

The orangery has been relocated.

 

The summer has been hot, but so far (mercifully) not AS hot as it has been in previous years (we have yet to exceed 34C). Nevertheless, the heat is a struggle at times, and in a bid to keep as much heat out of the house as possible Stuart has constructed an outdoor kitchen.

We also invested in some umbrellas - they make the world of difference and actually allow us to use our garden furniture. Without the umbrellas it's too uncomfortably hot to sit outside until about 8pm and prior to buying them we had been resorting to hiding from the sun in the car park!

This sort of umbrella is all well and good..

But these are SO much better!!!

Following the rat saga, we are slowly making progress with the long-awaited tidying up of the end of the house. This area has been an eyesore since we first moved in, and is the last remaining job that dates back from when we moved here. We have managed (I say "we" but my part in the process has been the unskilled part of filling in, while Stuart has done the skilled part of the rendering process) to get the first third of the wall rendered and a small section of the ground levelled off and gravelled. There's still a long way to go, but it has already made a huge difference and we can see what difference it will make when it's all finally done.

We have experimented with spraying our olive trees with kaolin - a basic clay mixed with water (which then dries on the tree) - to protect them from the olive fly. Apparently the coating of clay is enough to deter the fly... but whether or not it will make a difference is yet to be seen.

You can see the colour of the tree has changed where it has been sprayed.

We have now reached almost peak heat of the year - the coming week has temperatures of 34C forecast, which almost certainly means we will reach 37C here. And that sort of temperature makes it almost impossible to do anything other than hide inside the house. Which is not such a bad thing when you have a day job that needs your attention for 8 hours a day, but can be somewhat frustrating as well! So a slow down in activity is expected. Although of course the daily harvests of vegetables (and the watering) will continue. And a second batch of spicy plum chutney is currently in the making!