Sunday 28 May 2017

A Little Garden Pond


My wife Carole, loves the garden. It looks great and when I come home from work and on most days, Carole is in the garden. Often she is doing something or other. She has areas where she has planted various types of flowers. When the summer comes this turns into a rather splendid array of colour.

There is a greenhouse where she nurtures seeds for various other plants. Also tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and peppers. Outside but close to the greenhouse is a section where strawberries, gooseberries, and blueberries grow. We have young trees consisting of cherries, apples and plums too.

Then there is the chicken coop and the duck enclosure plus a wire box enclosure where a rabbit and two guinea pigs live. The only thing we did not have was a garden pond. On many occasions, I mentioned this but Carole did not seem very enthusiastic about it. I thought this strange because one of her brothers works on his pond and various pond plants all of the time.

Then this all changed a few days ago. I was out at work collecting a fly tip from a country lane out in the fenland close to the hamlet of Chatteris. Among the dumped things was a plastic mould of a small garden pond. I looked closely at it and found the thing was new. It had never been used. I put it in the back of the work van but was careful not to put it close to the rubbish bags.

On the way back to the dump, I drive down a small lane where I live. I stopped and took the pond moulding through to the back garden where my wife was pottering about doing her usual thing in her beloved garden. When she saw the pond mould and its new condition she was delighted. I was pleasantly surprised too because I was expecting her to be lukewarm to the idea. I left it with her and continued with my work.

About an hour later she called me on my mobile to say she had dug a hole and place the pond moulding inside and built a rockery around it with the displaced soil. When I got home it looked fine. She had even put the water in.

We left it like this for a few days but over the weekend, we went to an aquatic centre and bought a filter and a pump. There was also a small mould for a waterfall and so I decided to get this too. The filter has a pipe coming from the side and it can spill onto the waterfall mould and cascade down back into the pond where the pump works well and continues to send water to the filter again. We then had our continuous flow of water being filtered properly.

We also acquired various types of pond plant on another day including a water lily. There were other types of oxygenating plants too, but I do not know all the names. I also bought six fish. Three sherbumpkins and three goldfish.

Then on the next day, we bought some ground cover plants to go around the rockery area. This gave it that little bit of a kick-start for decoration. Obviously, it will look better when the low cover plants start to spread next year.

Today we were sitting on the decking looking at the waterfall and the fish swimming amid the various pond plants and we were jolly pleased with ourselves and our new addition to the garden.


I kind little waterfall and a grand place to sit.


     


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