The pond

Sometimes things go well, sometimes they suck. I'm all for gardening being good for mental health, it's been a lifesaver in the past but it's also difficult and I get things wrong, which doesn't make for lovely posts but it's part of the story. I get quite irritated with social media post with beautiful garden with ducks waddling through etc. No one wants to show the duck shit! Anyhow, this is my experience, metaphorical duck shit and all.

The pond

I’m feeling very, very, very irritated with my half arsery right now. I wanted a perfectly circular pond. It’s in the middle of a wild, meadowy area and I thought a neat shape would contrast nicely. It was a real pain to dig (thankfully my brother was on holiday with us and decided that what he really wanted to do was excavate our garden!). Turns out that at some point our ‘garden’ was used as a rubbish dump. This isn’t an exaggeration. It was used as a tip and then ± 10cm of topsoil was put down with grass over it. I pulled out half a boiler, the remains of someone’s pink bathroom tiles and matching basin, several shoes, a toothbrush, a grill, a complete pyrex baking dish, loads of broken bricks and sometimes bits of wall, and a ton of other rubbish. It was gross. But eventually, it was done. Unfortunately, my neat edges were buggered, and so was I. I tried neatening it up but every time I put a spade in, some other piece of rubble would be dislodged and would distort the edges. I gave up and decided it would have to be a bit wobbly, and went ahead and lined it. Got some nice old pavers to edge it, and then left it to settle in. This weekend I started setting the pavers in mortar. Now that all the pavers are in position you can really see how wonky it is. It doesn’t look like a natural pond, it looks like half arsed job. It is beyond irritating because I could have spent an extra day filling in the gaps where large bits of rubbish had come out, stabilising the edges and getting the shape right. One extra day. But, I didn’t and now I have to live with a roughly 3m diameter example of my half arsery in the middle of my garden. I can but hope the addition of pond plants and surrounding vegetation obscures the shape in summer.