new project to pond-er - part 1

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Gary the gardener very kindly gave me a large plastic trough that he said would fit neatly into the raised bed

He said it could be used as a pond, or as a planter, but if as a planter it’d need drainage holes. I said I’d try it as a pond first: if that didn’t work I could try a planter, but it’d be a bit hard to use it as a pond if it already had holes in the bottom!

The primroses from the centre section went into a tub

And the heather from the right-hand section went into the back loop bed

Started taking the soil out of the bed, which was harder work than I’d expected: on my knees with a hand-trowel, repeatedly stooping and turning to tip the soil into the trug. I checked for bulbs in the op layers, putting aside any I found to replant – shoved them into the bed just behind the raised bed for now.

I was using the red and blue plastic trugs to put the excavated soil in – four of them went to “landfill” the bottom-left bed (this was done before the “bulb relocation” which is detailed in its own blog – I was doing both projects at the same time, bit here, bit there).

Then I hit brick – this was why I’d divided the bed into sections when I’d first dug it there were bricks across the bed

That wouldn’t be low enough for the pond to sit in, so I decided to take those bricks out. They were bonded in with the walls, so that meant taking the walls down …

And stacking them up to one side

I still hadn’t even started on the Snow-in-Summer end yet – Gary said that if I put some at the back of the garden, it’d make ground cover. (I put some usable clumps aside, but sadly forgot about them till two days later, when they were only usable in the composter)

More soil out, more bricks out …

The bed was very unevenly “based” – the right-hand end was soil all the way down, then there were the bricks, and the middle and left ends were chock-full of bits of roof tile, which I took out and dumped in the bed behind the gate where I’d removed the bulbs.

This is quite long enough, so part 2 to follow shortly

• 18 Jul, 2014
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