#30DaysWild Day 4 - Make a pond

This week, over half term, we've been busy making a pond for our back garden. We have a large flower bed that stretches half way across the centre of the garden. The front of it is full of wonderful flowers, but the back is a mass of ground elder and a bit neglected. It's the perfect place for a new pond and wildlife garden.

The back of the flower bed is a bit sad and neglected

I cleared the ground elder and dug up as many of the roots as I could. I think it will be a bit of a running battle to keep it at bay, but at least this is a start! Then everybody, including the dog, had a go at digging the hole. We piled up the soil at the end of the garden, ready to dig into my vegetable patch (which will probably be a 'next year' project).

The pond has three levels. It's deep at the back, then has a shallow part at the front for birds to bathe in and creatures to drink from and a level between the two on the right hand side. We put a pond liner in, making sure there was plenty of overlap and filled it with water from the water butt.



We trimmed the liner and put stones all around the edge, to hold the liner down and cover where it was cut. We'll also put plants all around the edge later.

We carefully tipped our tadpoles into the pond (they were living in a big bucket) and put a layer of pebbles in the shallow part of the pond for them to hide amongst. We added some pond weed, watercress and floating lilies and floated a small, solar powered fountain on the water (to help oxygenate the pond).

Launch day for the tadpoles!

Then we left the pond to settle and waited to see what wildlife would find it and make it their home.

Today we were thrilled to see two pairs of mating red damselflies on the pond and one of them was even laying eggs in the pond.  Less than a week old and our pond seems to be a success already! Can't wait to see what else is attracted to it!!