On Friday I drained the pond. Or rather I bailed hundreds of gallons of smelly, gloopy water using whatever came to hand - plastic planters, a broken watering can and the rabbit's litter tray.
A catastrophic and fatal error closed down the laptop on Friday and left me unable to post a blog entry last week. This followed an equally frustrating Christmas ipod incident.
So I'm venting my anger by working on something that does not have a plug, and for which I do not need to download the wrong sort of software: the pond.
Early this summer it sprung a leak and the water dropped 30 centimetres leaving an unsightly fringe of stained black plastic liner. I've been meaning to get round to it for months. Now I need some exercise to counter the effects of too many chocolate fancies and all that smoked cheese.
On Friday I drained the pond. Or rather I bailed several hundreds of gallons of smelly, gloopy water using whatever came to hand - plastic planters, a broken watering can and the rabbit's litter tray (which was very conveniently shaped I have to say). I've kept some of the pondweed in a bucket and spread the rest on a plastic sheet before I get rid of it on the compost heap. Not surprisingly there is not much life in it. In summer the weed is alive with all sorts of wriggling larvae, nymphs and maggots, but now they have mostly descended into the ooze below.
By Saturday it was all but empty when two frogs started splashing about in the murky dregs. They went into the bucket with the damselfly larvae, and after poking their noses about for a few minutes they disappeared to the bottom of the tub.
I now realize that I have bought rather too much liner. The trouble is the pond is triangular, made of three stacked layers of old railway sleepers. It's not large, only 3.5 by 1.5 metres. And although it is over a metre deep in one corner, it shelves to nothing in another. Oh well, I'll just use the rest on the shed roof, where the roofing felt has ripped and partly blown away. It'll certainly keep the rain out.
On Sunday I'm down to the last few handfuls of muddy silt in the deep end. I'd been sieving the last few bucket loads and the overwintering insect larvae were coming out thick and fast. In virtually the last scoop of mud a pointy head poked out from the sieve. It's another frog. This one doesn't splash about though. It's a plastic toy. Now I wonder which minx threw that in.
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