Drought? What drought...?

I my last post I mentioned our holiday plans - to build a pond. I have had a lot of enquiries on how it has been going, so I thought I would share an update.

This is the state at the end of the first day - Saturday. It doesn't take long to dig through the topsoil and reach the clay, and being chilly I decide to call it a day! Like my wellies?

Sunday - a night of rain and my lovely half dug pond looks like this! Ooops! I heard there was a drought on...

A burst of sunshine on Monday morning filled us with renewed vigour, and 48 buckets of water later - and the pond is empty again. The clay was fun to work with now as the increased rainfall turned it to slop! Lovely!

 So a few hours slopping and shaping the pond - and in goes the pond liner!

So now with the aid of a few buckets of water and some bricks and tubs to weight the liner down, we just wait for rain!

 And more rain is what we got! It rained all day Tuesday so we stayed inside all toasty and I worked on a quilt.

This morning 1 1/2 tonnes of pebbles were delivered on our drive so we thought we had better get on with it today. These need to be hand sorted so that we only use round pebbles (no sharp bits to puncture that precious liner!), and washed so we didn't fill the pond with grit. Oh boy!

We started to put them in the pond and disaster! The rain on Tuesday had seeped underneath the pond liner and made it bubble up. The rain has also half filled the top of the pond, so the liner was suspended somewhere in the middle! New plan - peel back the pond liner as much as I can and use a jug to bail out the water under the lining. I emptied the jug into a bigger bucket and Pail emptied the full buckets down the drain. Talk about laborious.
So once that was done, we were back to filling the pond with pebbles!
A few hours of backbreaking work, and we are nearly there! About a million buckets of water later (or so it feels) the pond is starting to fill up.

 Yay - a pond!

So that is the end of phase 1! Next we wait for some rain to fill it up ... and then the planting begins. I want plants in the pond, as well as a bog garden to one side (using the rest of the pond liner) and then plants around the edge to soften the look (and ensure that Paul won't have to mow over pebbles).

I think we will wait a few days before we begin that lot! We both have aches in places we didn't know we had muscles, so a rest may well be on order. Tomorrow we are heading to the plant auctions in Spalding to pick up some summer colour for the new bed you can glimpse in some of the pictures. At least that means digging in soil rather than clay!

I will soon be back at work for a rest!