Pond Ponderings – An Emerging Story!

28/06/2023

By Alison and Marc Dilnutt

We started off with a very small pond about six years ago then in lockdown we went crazy and hand-dug our current pond.  It’s about a sixth of our garden now and we love it. When we dug the new one, we decanted all the water from our old one and kept the hard plastic liner to one side with all the sludge and creatures, then tipped it into the new pond.  We’d had damselflies mating and laying eggs in it so we wanted to give them a chance.

We’ve got two waterfalls with the water rotating from one end of the pond to the other through a bog garden at one end.  We have a beach at the other end and have placed logs around the edges.  We have an apple tree next to the pond and under that we’ve put more logs piled up and any broken terracotta pots upturned to create shelter for amphibians.  Although that area drives me nuts with snails and slugs, it’s probably what attracted the newts, so I’ve learned to like them.  We found a stag beetle in the garden a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t seen one of them since I was a child.  We have bats which circle over the pond at dusk as well.

We’ve got other dragonfly and damselfly larvae in the pond now and we saw two tiny blue damselflies mating and dipping into the pond last week so we’re hoping there will be more.