We've Got Ducks!

While working on the new garden fence at the weekend, Caroline suddenly exclaimed "We've got ducks!". I looked over to the pond, and there were a couple of Mallard ducks swimming around as happy as anything, sticking their bums in the air as they fed off the bottom! We were amazed. They stayed long enough for me to take some quick photos before flying off.

New Fence and Last Breath of Winter

The first day of Spring, and one of the more Wintery looking mornings of the past 6 months! We got a light dusting of snow overnight, and woke to this view of the garden. We have been working hard in the garden over a couple of weekends to replace the fence along the entire length of the garden as seen on the left side of this picture. So far we have put up 6 new panels, with 7 and a bit to go. The bulk of the work has actually been in removing the old fence, which was held in place by 20 years of ivy growth. We took the opportunity to dig this out, roots and all on both sides of the fence, along with several Elderberry trees which were pretty well established. The garden already looks much lighter, and we seem to have much more border space than before. This is not because the fence line has moved! We replaced it along the same line. Our neighbour also seems to have more useable border space too. It is the effect of using a lower and more open fence panel style, which we made by combining some 90cm high panels with 60cm lattice panels on top, where there used to be 180cm tall solid lap panels (plus all that ivy of course).

Frogs Spawn in New Pond

I was pleased to discover this morning that the frogs have spawned this year, and chosen the new pond to do so. I grabbed a quick picture as it was a nice morning. There looks to be a lot more spawn than we ever got in the old pond, so I guess they like the new facilities! The new pond has a choice of habitats, and as I expected, they chose the shallower area to leave their spawn. The patch of frog spawn measures about 80cm by 80cm.