Cleaning out the pond

For some time now, our garden pond has needed cleaning.  It was half full of flag iris and duckweed and many of the creatures that the newts feed on were absent.  So, I placed a plastic tarpaulin at the pond side and with some help from Rosie, dragged the mass of flag irises out of the pond.

Tea and cake later, I trimmed the irises into bags and dredged buckets full of gunk and rotten leaves from the bottom of the pond.  The gunk is now on the rhubarb.

The frogs were very good.  When I was dredging the pond out, they all climbed up onto the concrete shelf, which was above the water line, and watched the proceedings.  Most of the frogs in the pond are veterans and are used to me messing about around them.

After skimming the pond to reduce the duckweed and rescuing a couple of blue irises, I topped it up with water.  With a larger surface area of water and less duckweed, I expect to see lots more wildlife in this pond.

The frogs seem happy.  They have a much cleaner and more diverse pond to live around.