Cooling off
Suddenly, with very little warning, summer turned up. This meant that when I came home from work, I had to water my plants. While I was at it I pulled up the weeds sharing the pots (surprisingly few) and gave the plants some nice bonemeal and ericaceous granules, as appropriate.
It was a perfect day for sitting on the edge of the raised pond and looking at all the life going on within it. In the past week or so the water has cleared and now I can see just how many creatures there are in it. There are millions of very small round ones which are probably water fleas, and some mini-worms, and also some insects which could be water boatmen. I think these tiny little things are collectively responsible for eating some of my plants. But not all of them. The Upright Milfoil has won the day, with its beautiful foliage still intact. I have put it in deeper water and it’s more than equal to the challenge. I am wondering if it is mainly responsible for the clearing of the pond water, since the only other oxygenator still alive, the Water Crowfoot, is only just growing fast enough to avoid being eaten completely.
The Upright Milfoil growing uprightly and doing a fantastic oxygenating job
The shallow pond has no vegetation in it yet because I still need to repair it, but I was delighted to have a visitor.
A frog happily cooling off next to my luxury rainbow cobbles in the shallow pond
My path behind the apple trees is now overgrown, mainly with buddleia. I am probably still going to keep the path there, though, and just accept that in the summer months it’s a bit of a squeeze getting past. It does demonstrate that it’s worth checking the viability of paths in both summer and winter.
The path overgrown with buddleia and apple trees
And finally, when I opened the bag of ericaceous compost in the greenhouse, I found that it had turned into a giant ants’ nest. I still used the compost to mix in with ericaceous plant food and spread it around the base of my rhododendrons, camellia, blueberries and kalmia. I’m not sure whether these bits of nests will turn into new nests. If they do, I will have an awful lot of ants by the end of the summer.