Feast or famine

Today it rained.  For only a few minutes, and very very lightly, but it rained.  It is supposed to rain a little tomorrow, and even more the next day and for at least a week after that.

Last year, that would have been unremarkable.  Last year was wet.  Very wet.  This year – not so much, in fact there has been hardly any rain for some weeks.  Cloud and fog, yes, but very little rain.  The ground is hard and dry, and I’ve been watering the pots and seedbeds to keep things going.  Not that I’m complaining; the weather has been mostly sunny, although often with a chilly wind from the north or north-east, and I’ve been able to work in the garden most days when time permits.

This is a pond.  Or not ....

As I noted in a recent post, the water level in the pond has dropped considerably.  I’ve given up trying to keep it topped up; I manage it as a wildlife pond, letting the level go up and down with the weather as happens in nature.  But watching a blackbird run across the surface one day brought home to me just how badly it needed attention.  I’ve taken advantage of the dry weather to get in there and tackle the problem, before the rains fill it up again.

The main problem is the iris; a lovely plant, but it has spread itself right across the pond, filling the whole thing with its roots and swamping the only other plant in there, a water lily.  When I got down to it, it turned out that the vegetation not only supported the weight of a passing blackbird, but in most places it supported my weight, which is not inconsiderable.  There is water, but most of the area is solid root.  The only way to get it out is to take the old bread-knife to the plant and cut it out, bit by bit; this is hampered by the roots having wrapped themselves around some of the big pebbles that are supposed to be covering the pond margins but many of which have slipped down into the water.  Chipping them out of the rootballs is a slow process, and I’ve only managed to clear about a third of the pond area, and that mostly around the edges; the difficult bit will be the deeper central area, where the roots go right down to the bottom of the pond.  There are also at least two plastic pots in there, the original containers of the iris and water lily, and the bread-knife won’t cut through those.  Still, a start has been made, and I hope to move forward as the weather allows!

A start has been made!

I took a break from pond clearance – it’s hard work on the back – to attend to the sickly euonymus nearby.  On close inspection it looks like a scale insect attack, though I can’t see any actual insects.  There’s a lot of healthy new growth at the ends of long bare, scaly, stems, so the plant doesn’t look as if it’s about to die, and there are also fresh shoots low down.  So I’ve cut it back hard (and taken cuttings as insurance), and am hoping that it will regenerate.

The euonymus, cut back

The dry weather has not been entirely to the liking of the birds; the blackbirds in particular are feeding nestlings, and finding it difficult to dig up worms for them.  They and the robins have been following my gardening progress with great interest, and clearing the pond edges has thrown up some nice damp corners for them to dig around in.  The mystery of the blackbirds’ apples disappearing from the patio has been solved; this evening, before I had gone out to cover the apple up for protection, a rat appeared and bounded away, rather awkwardly, with the remains of the apple in its mouth, taking it under the hedge.  Some of the apples are nearly as big as the rat, so it can’t be an easy takeaway!