Every source of natural gardening guidance states that a pond is a must for attracting beneficial critters into the garden. By that, I mean toads, frogs and newts who are the most voracious eaters of slugs, snails and other grubs that would otherwise eat garden plants.

Of course they also attract a whole host of other critters, such as dragonflies, which, I’m not so sure are a great help as such but they’re certainly a delightful addition to a garden and I think I may be right that their larvae eat mosquito larvae etc so I suppose that helps to keep down one of the negatives of having a pond. Not that that’s a problem here as such because there is so much water around us (despite our location perched on top of a hill) that we are completely smothered in midges and mosquitoes from June to the end of the summer. A few more in our pond won't make the slightest difference to the overall population.

Anyway, I dug a pond last autumn, using an old bathtub that had come to the end of its life as a household item. I’d had it stashed away behind a bush for a couple of years so I could use it for this very purpose. I dug a hole about three feet deep and distinctly coffin shaped. DM was quite worried I can tell you. After putting the bath into the bottom, I widened it around the top 1’ or 18” in a random manner so it didn’t look like a sunken bath (the bath’s top is around 14” below the waterline). This gives me a shelf about a foot or more deep for planting marginals on.

Then I lined the whole lot with a pond liner and put in a foot of water from the water main. I didn’t cut the liner, other than a rough hack around about two feet from the edge of the pond and I chucked a few granite blocks on top to stop the liner blowing in to the hole. Since then, it’s been left to its own devices other than me chucking a couple of buckets of pond sludge from the old (holed) pond next to it. That was to ensure that we get the benefit of the microbial life that exists in a pond straight away. The winter rains have filled it to the brim.

I kept looking at it and thinking “I must finish that off”. Then my next-door neighbour collared me and asked me if I’d like some top soil, which I used to fill the old pond in to make a bog garden. So, there was no excuse for not finishing the pond.

In between working in the kitchen today, I’ve dashed outside and hauled granite around so that the pond is now finished apart from the planting. Tomorrow I’m off out for pond plants and bog plants and I’ll be finishing it off properly. Then, it’ll only take a bit of time for it all to bed in and look as though it’s been there years.

The whole process has taken me about six months, but it’s hardly been intense – a few days of hard graft at the beginning and a couple more at the end but in the meanwhile it’s just quietly got on with its own thing.