Making our Meadow Blog

Pond shrinks again!

Well filling up the pond was a bit of a waste of time it has
shrunk back to where it was last week already, leaving the liner dangerously exposed
to sunlight and the Pondcam high and
dry! Having checked with other local pond owners who have not experienced this
sort of evaporation it makes me worried that we may have a leak. If that is the
case what can we do? I wouldn’t mind turning it into a bog garden but I don’t
know where I can put another pond as a replacement. It would need to be the
right side of the Max proof fence and everywhere is already chock full of vegetable
beds and the meadow. And I don’t think Nicole will let me get rid of her
beloved frogs…

Meadow pics

The dry meadow and the overgrown path.

Time to cut the hay?

The heatwave continues and the pond has dropped another few inches in a couple of days. I'm not sure if it a is a leak or just evaporation. If it is a leak it opens up the prospect of that bog garden I always wanted to make...

The parched conditions are also drying up the mini meadow with all the red clover and most of the flowers already going to seed. Only the later flowering Devils bit scabious and St John's wort are still blooming away, so they must stay. They make a tunnel which Max (and Nicole!) love to push through to get to the pond. Perhaps  it is time to cut the hay, before it gets too dry to manage? The neighbours' cats have flattened most of the grass down (is there no end to the ways they find to annoy me...?) which is annoying from a visual point of view but may be irrelevant to the invertabrates who dwell there. Probably a lot less detrimental than cutting it, but it needs to be done. However it does make me worry about the orchids I am planning to try to plant...

Pond update

We hacked back the rank vegetation which covered the pond on Wednesday and discovered just how much it had dropped - I reckon about 18"! So I topped it up, which is not ideal but really needed to be done. It has dropped 4" since then, which does not bode well. But we can now enjoy the wildlife in the pond again! Frogs toads and dozens of newts!

Pond update

We hacked back the rank vegetation which covered the pond on Wednesday and discovered just how much it had dropped - I reckon about 18"! So I topped it up, which is not ideal but really needed to be done. It has dropped 4" since then, which does not bode well. But we can now enjoy the wildlife in the pond again! Frogs toads and dozens of newts!