Garden Journal - Pond Tidying Day

I had a fabulous plan all lined up for the weekend. I was going to lift the mass of pond irises out and trim them down to a manageable size, before the frogs came out of hibernation.

Then the frogs came along and created a whole lot of frogspawn.

But I decided that although I'd have to be a lot more careful, something still needed to be done, the pond was a mess.

The photo below is the starting state, looking from the back of the garden towards the house. Dead stems everywhere, and quite a lot of debris blown in from nearby trees by the storms we've had.

This is the same state, from the front looking towards the end of the garden. I'm not worried about the pond weed, it hides the wildlife living in the pond from predators, and (I think) is an oxygenator.

The problem with the irises are that they're lovely plants, but run wild. The previous year's stems die off into the pond, making a solid mat of stems, roots, new growth and caught debris. They make their own perfect growing environment, but if I left them, the pond would be gone in a couple of years.

Also, they drink up a lot of water when the weather is hot and dry, meaning I have to continually top the pond up in the summer (making sure the water has been standing for 3-4 days to let the fluoride evaporate off).

I had three goals;

1. Disturb the frogspawn as little as possible. I like our frogs, and they help keep insects, slugs and snails under control.
2. Clear out as much debris from the pond as sensible, get rid of most of the dead stems, and try to reduce the number of pond irises.
3. Don't fall in.

After about an hour and a half and four buckets full of dead stuff, this is what it looked like;

I appreciate it doesn't look massively different, but I scoped a huge amount of leaves and dead stems out.

There's still plenty of murkiness, which I like, because an over-tidy environment is actually not great for an ecosystem. But you can see more water now, and I've got rid of most of the stems that will clog the pond in the summer.

Can you see all the frogspawn ? It all appeared literally overnight - naughty sexy-maniac froggies !

Also, the clump of greenery in our new greenhouse has produced some lovely snowdrops 😀

All photos in this post taken by me