Helen's Garden Renovation Project

I am always taken by surprise by the rate of growth of plants in summer. Moving plants from an unsuitable location to somewhere they like has made a huge difference and the garden is showing the most exuberance I have seen since I started the Renovation Project. This is the path going up the left hand side of the garden.

Left hand side path

Little Alice Hoffman, who I thought had died one winter, is now enormous and jostling for space with my variegated holly. The geraniums would like to grow all over the path. And the euonymus europaeus is giving next door’s Leylandii a run for their money.

I was gutted about losing the Willowherb Elimination Stakes for the 18th year running.

Willowherb setting seed

The Blagdon Green Away turned the water brown, which I suppose counts as less green, but didn’t do anything I could detect to the algae. Meanwhile, the watercress is thriving, but seems quite happy to exist peacefully alongside the blanketweed. My next plan is to remove as much of the algae as possible by hand and stick, and then put some barley straw in, which has just arrived by post today.

The weather has finished filling my pond for me, and I have trimmed the edge of the liner and buried it. The pond is now fully operational and ready to start filling up with green slime, like the other two (it has already made a start on this). According to standard pond advice, I am now supposed to hide the liner. In due course there will be plants around the pond which will partly hide it, and I intend to glue some cobbles to the shallow parts of the pond, which will help disguise the folds. But I have no intention of going all out to pretend that there isn’t a liner there.

However, if someone comes up with an original idea to hide the liner… that’s different. My boss (yes, the one who gave me the idea of digging the pond 3 feet deep) said that he draped algae across the edge of the pond and moss grew on top of it. And I thought this was worth a try, especially as I have to get the algae out of the raised pond sometime, and I have to put it somewhere. I think my algae is more the clumpy sort than the drapey sort, but I don’t think the moss will care. So, this is the result.

Pond with algae edging

There is the risk that at least 25% of the three readers of this blog will laugh at me, but I’ll just have to put up with that. And given the ease with which moss grows on my roof tiles and in my lawn, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. If it doesn’t, I’ll just put the algae in the compost bin.

This is what my raised pond looked like after I had decimated the algae.

Raised pond with algae

I then added some Blagdon Green Away to the raised pond. This is supposed to work by clumping the algae together, and then I need to apply some Sludge Buster, apparently. I will leave it to do its stuff – it doesn’t say how long it’s supposed to take – and see what happens. I think some of the pond life is already grateful that I have removed even a small part of the algae.

Let’s skate again