Garden Pond Building

Its now the end of yet another much enjoyed Springwatch series, and I reckon its been one of the best so far. I think its great for encouraging people to make their gardens more wildlife friendly. Recently, my Dad has been working on a little pond for our garden in true Springwatch style. Well, sort-of anyway!

We have wanted a pond in the garden for a while now, for a few reasons. I, for one thought that a pond would be great for the birds to bath and drink from. Whilst we already have a bird bath, a pond encourages ground feeding birds like Blackbirds to visit. Also, over the years, we have seen frogs quite a number of times around the garden, and we thought they might like a pond to live in. I suppose a pond provides habitats for other animals too. I'll look forward to seeing what uses it in the future.

Pond-building is such a great way to attract wildlife to your garden. A pond is also surprisingly easy to create, especially if you build a very small one like ours. I am sure that many of you reading this now probably have a pond already. I must admit that our pond really is tiny (just less than a metre across), but hopefully, it will still make a difference to the garden.

We chose to site our pond next to our blackcurrant, raspberry and Gooseberry bushes, where we had a little bit of spare space. My Dad then dug a hole about a metre in diameter with the middle of the hole being about a foot deep. He then used a stretched out empty bark chippings bag to line the hole. He put a bit of soil on top of the lining to weigh it down. And after the water had been added, the result was this... (see picture below)

After surrounding the outide with pebbles and a couple of plants, the pond is nearly finished. Over the next few weeks, we will plant some more plants, pondweed, etc to make it look a bit more natural. I know that you are thinking "it looks like a muddy pool" when you look at the photo below! The photo below was taken last week and, luckily, it has cleared quite significantly since then!



I have already seen the House Sparrows, Blackbirds, Greenfinches and Woodpigeons take a drink from the pond, which was great to see. Hopefully, when we get some more water plants, it will encourage frogs, etc into the pond at some point, despite its small size. While I'm on the subject, here is a photo of a frog on a low garden wall taken by me last year:


Maybe the chappy in the photo above will be seen in our new pond in the future. I'll keep you posted on any updates. The Alliums have been out a while in our garden now, so I think I'll post the photos of those soon. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.