The Garden Pond Blog

The old pond has few bathing birds: it’s probably too close to cat-concealing cover.

But out in the open, the new pond must seem a bit safer for a wash and brush up, especially if you’ve got a friend with you

Check out the photosequence on Flikr from Colin on the creation of his new pond (see the comments, right).

Go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/colinandelaine/sets/72157622076111366/

Colin writes:

A water beetle arrived the day after adding the water that you see now and another one came a few days ago. It’s supposed to rain heavily on Thursday! Now I need help with what to do about native plants if anything so local newts that i find in the garden will have somewhere to go by next spring. The area behind the pond will be a bog. It may be a bit shaded but it always gets sun for part of the day. The cherry tree is quite thin and alows quite a lot of light through. The leaves and blossom may be a problem but this was the only space i had to put a pond …I’m sure I can deal with them when the time comes. Looking forward to posts about the developement of your number 2 pond.

After the clean water makeover of the Blue Peter pond earlier in the year, here’s Katy last week when we topped it up with clean rainwater.

The good news: because everyone had taken great care not to top up the pond with tapwater, conductivity was still only 115. Very encouraging.

Plenty of baby newts, and a good mix of other animals: on Big Pond Dip the cleaned up pond scores a good 38, mainly becuase of the damselflies and alderflies.

The Countryfile crew came to film the pond on Monday.

It should be going out this Sunday.

Emerging Common Darter dragonfly amongst grasses at the edge of the pond

The latest event on the pond is that Common Darter Dragonflies have been emerging.

The picture shows one of the two that got away successfully as it was expanding and drying-off it wings.

People often say that you need emergent plants for dragonflies to emerge on.

The picture shows that this isn’t always true, especially for those species that come to new ponds, like the Common Darter, and can happily emerge on quite low growing grasses.

Hi All

Answers to some questions coming soon – I’m a bit snowed under with school holidays at the moment!

Jeremy