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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

-year-old is still enthralled by insects, and was amazed by the bellowing buzz coming from the drain outside our back door recently. Suddenly, a black and yellow insect, large enough to make the rest of the family wince, floated out through the cast iron grill cover

is that the well-drained substrate (usually including crushed brick and concrete) produces a sparse vegetation of mainly annual wildflowers, and areas of bare ground that rapidly warm up in the sun. This favours the warmth-loving insects that elsewhere in Britain

is heavy London clay about 30-50 cm down, and nothing like the well-drained calcareous or sandy soil indicated by the textbooks. But I know, from personal experience, that local gardens are often full of rubble, and as well as improving the drainage, much

. Last year was the first time frog spawn appeared, but no tadpoles ever seemed to develop. Now the pond has sprung a leak and 30cm of ugly butyl liner have been exposed. I'm going to have to drain and clear the whole thing and start again. So that