We Dug the Garden Pond Deeper and Now Want More.

We bought a new and bigger pond liner a few weeks back. Then we decided to dig deeper and widen the pond. We took all of the fish out and put them in a big black bathtub. My step-son Graham went on a mammoth digging mission. The surplus earth was displaced around the fence perimeters and more rock wall for the plant boundary etc. This I did with the wheelbarrow as graham filled it with soil.

Eventually, we were able to lay the new pond liner refill and then put the fish back in their new home. Graham went and bought two new Ghost Carp adding to the nineteen fish we already had. We sat down and decided that next year, we'll get a mini digger and some railway sleepers and make the pond double the size it is now. That way the Koi, Ghost and Israeli Carp will grow even bigger.

The frogs and newts have come back within days. They seem to approve. My wife and I move the small table and chairs and stare down at the fish. It is becoming rather therapeutic. 

Back in the Fenland Garden Today.

You wake up in the morning and look out of the bedroom window at this. You have several days off and you think, "Yes, this works for me. Especially, on a day like this."

Everything is done and dusted. The winter cruise is waiting to break up the winter months. For now, it is summer and the wheat fields to the front of the house are causing me to sneeze. I think I may have mild hay fever, but it is nothing I can't bare.

Carole and I wandered down the town and bought some bird seed for the many hanging feeds etc. The only fly in that ointment is the Sparrow Hawk that knows they various Finches and Sparrows go to the feeds. I hung the feed plates in the tree to make it more difficult for the Sparrow Hawk to attack the fledgelings.  

I'm no gardener. Yet I love my garden. My wife is the gardener. I get to say what flowers I like and she seems to know about the presentation and all. In this sense, I'm lucky. When I'm at work, she potters about in the garden all day. I think she is in her element.

The front is done with a wild cascade of flowers too. I like the more wild and unconventional look. I like cosmos and cornflowers plus the many poppies. I like everything going undisciplined and mad. Nature doing its thing. 

Tranquil Hours in the Fenland Garden.

My wife, Carole, and I spent hours in the garden yesterday afternoon. I bought some beers and they were slipping down very easily. We put the world to rights with our small talk, but it did not matter. We were just enjoying the fruits of the many good things we have. Especially the nice garden on a summer evening. The dog and the cat were in on the act too. They were laying about with us. Spoke with my sons on their mobiles and went out to a few of the surrounding market towns earlier in the day. Including King's Lynn, where we had a wander over the retail parks. All nice casual meandering about Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Then back home in time for feet up on the decking looking out at the cornflowers. I do like the cornflowers each year.

A View to a New Garden Pond.

Every time my wife and I do our pond, we sit back and decide to make it a little bigger. This is the third one. Now, we are thinking of railway sleepers around it to give a little more depth. We can do this with the pond liner. Obviously, there would be some sort of creeper and hanging plant garnish around the sleepers. It would stop them looking to bland among the plants.

I am also wondering about a new filter system with a more elaborate waterfall effect. This oxygenates the water nicely and the fall is therapeutic when we sit on the decking.

The fish are multiplying too. Last year, we noticed a lot of minos zooming around the plants. Twelve of these new fish have survived among the eight we purchased. The minos have grown. At first, they began to wander in a group of their own. Now, they have started to interact with others. Their black colour is changing below the belly area.

All this makes for pleasant debate when my wife and I sit on the decking in the summer evening.

The Last Blast of Floral Colour for the Dying Summer.

I got home from work and went into the back garden. My wife had been pottering about in her much-loved domain for most of the day. Our little dog Darcey was wiggling her bottom and tail waiting for me to make a fuss of her. Which I did. Something that must be done upon my return home each afternoon.

I told Carole about the Common Buzzard I had seen on the telephone pole and she told me of a Red Kite being pestered by crows above the fields to the front of our house.

It was then that I noticed the flora around the garden pond. I made some 'wow' type comment and Carole said a new little aspect of flora had grown about the new pond we had put down. I thought it looked splendid. In a few weeks, the whole garden will look bleak and so will the fields and tree clusters. The winter stillness will come with its new look. Bleak and sad. Windswept but not too bad.

My Mad Garden Patch is Full of Colour.

It is grand to sit on the decking with a cold beer and chat with my wife as the summer days linger. The decking overlooks this wonderful mad display of flowers. It will be like this until September. Various flowers will bloom and die as the cycle goes on. 

With a few days off, I'm going to the market at Ely. Perhaps I will take a fancy to a new shrub on the garden stalls.

A Frog Moves into the New Garden Pond.

A Frog Moves into the Pond.

Our little garden pond is coming along nicely. We added some pond plants and they have taken very well. The fish are swimming around contently and the little waterfall that works via the filter pump is trickling along nicely. We get a regular visitor who is a male blackbird. He loves to bath in the waterfall most days. He seems to have got used to us watching him from the decking where we sit.

To my delight, a Frog has moved in too. I knew it would not take long and do hope it will find a partner for the next spring so that the frog spawn will come about. Then we will have tadpoles and such. Perhaps newts too.

Loving All the Garden Flowers.

Everything is taking off 'BIG TIME' in the garden. My wife and I had planned to go out, but when we sat on the decking for a while and drank our tea and coffee, we decided to stay put and enjoy the garden for the day. We had food and drink plus the constant coming and going of the various garden birds. 

Why not indeed? It is very pleasant and I have my laptop outside while writing this little blog. The water fountain and waterfall is trickling away wonderfully.

The Garden Starts to Bloom.

My wife and I spent a pleasant day in the garden yesterday. The little pond's waterfall was working splendidly alongside our cascading water feature. The bedding area is coming along and the summer flowers are beginning to bloom well. The Australian Bottle Brush is flowering in the front garden and various new flora seems to be coming along. 

Carole drew my attention to the first blue cornflower growing within the array of plants. This was pleasing too. I love the summer in the Fenland. Everything turns from being barren and bleak to vibrant colour. It's wonderful. I was sitting in the garden reading my kindle and chatting to Carole while the garden was doing its thing around us combined with the trickle of water. It was all very Wind in the Willows stuff.

 

The first cornflower came out in vibrant blue but there look to be other colours in waiting. These buds are just beginning to show. The Lupins are springing up too.

Generally, the garden is developing year by year and within the next week, I expect to see more varieties of flora start to bloom. 

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.