Work Starts on Wildlife Pond

Two productive days work in the garden with much help from my father-in-law has seen the basic shape of the long planned pond dug out. We have an old pond which was there when we moved into the house, but it fails in all the important criteria for a wildlife pond. A well designed pond for wildlife should feature the following:
- Shallow sides to allow easy access to wildlife
- Shallow water zones (<50cm depth)
- Deep water zone (>50cm depth, preferably 1 metre deep)
- A large enough overall volume to cope with Summer temperatures

Our old pond has vertical sides and a uniform depth of about 50cm. Too deep for frogspawn and not deep enough to stop the water getting too hot in Summer. The new pond is much larger and will have the required shallow and deep zones. Due to the gradual slope across the garden, we had to build up the down slope edge of the pond to make the edges level all round. This has the major advantages that we do not have to dig as deep a hole to get the desired 1 metre depth, and we can use all the spoil to build up the ground around the lower end of the pond. You can see the basic shape in the picture below. The old pond is located in the corner of the garden at the back of this picture. Eventually I hope to remodel the original pond and turn it into a header pond for a waterfall, flowing into the new pond.



Our garden is on the site of an old builders yard, and we were still digging through rubble at the bottom of the pond. Eventually we will use all the rubble we have dug out to raise the surrounding area back up to the new raised edge of the pond, resulting in a pond that is set into a level garden.