(gentle music)
- It's a year since we were filming here
and a lot has happened in that time.
Not least a very dry summer.
The pond did fill up, briefly, in January last year,
and then it pretty much stopped raining at all.
We just had dribbles and it was never enough
to maintain the input of water from the ditch,
which we had hoped would keep some kind of level here.
So during the summer we managed to get
some tadpoles actually into frogs before it got too dry,
and then the water almost disappeared.
In fact, at one point, there was zero water here.
There was just a bit of mud in the bottom
and it looked like a lost cause.
And I was coming under a lot of pressure
to get a liner in there, get it full of water.
But then in September the weather changed
and we started to have some rain.
(gentle music)
This is 4th of November,
and look how the pond has filled recently,
but only very recently.
We've actually had 130 millimetres
that's just over five inches of rain
in the last two weeks it's been unusual storms.
And the pond has gone from being not a pond,
it was dead empty, as little as three weeks ago.
Then there was a little puddle in the bottom for a week
and then it's suddenly gone like this.
I don't yet know how well this is going to hold longer term.
The drain there is flowing a little bit.
So the ditch has filled with water.
We've had enough rain for that.
And now, well, here's hoping.
We'll come back in the middle of the winter
and see what the next stage is.
And here we are in late December.
Since that little clip in November,
we've had nearly 200 millimetres of rain
that's around eight inches.
A little bit more than normal, wet autumn.
It's been fantastic for the pond as you can see.
The level's almost as high as it can be in fact.
It will go a little bit higher.
There's a pipe over there,
which would take away excess if it gets too high.
Well, it's a great joy.
It's a culmination,
no, it's not a culmination.
We had, there's no endpoint in this story.
It's a pond without a liner,
which is what I want to achieve.
I don't like too much plastic.
I use plastic in my job for sure,
but never more than I need to.
And this seemed like a project
we could do without using plastic.
And I have done that before.
Back in the 1980s, I made a pond, I dug it by hand.
It was stone soil where I was at the time.
And it definitely needed a liner there.
There was no way that was going to hold water.
And so, I put in a liner there and filled it with water.
And yeah, got a pond, you know, I've done that.
I know you can do it.
And then of course, there is always the question,
what if the liner gets a hole and you lose all your water
and you then you got to throw away the plastic.
I don't know if you can repair them maybe.
So, that was where I didn't want to go.
And Jack who was helping me was
keen to do it in clay as well.
And we had experience actually also
at my previous garden making a pond on clay,
which more or less worked.
And there there was a big advantage,
which was an input of water.
That's something we have not got here.
So, that's why Jack went to some trouble
to dig out the ditch over there
and put in a pipe underground from that ditch,
which is slightly higher output
than the entry point into this pond.
And we've noticed through the year
that whenever there's been sufficient rain,
which has only happened since September in fact.
That ditch will be sending water to the pond
quite a lot after it rains,
but then the level drops fairly quickly.
And in the last three days, for example,
we've had eight millimetres
about a third of an inch of rain.
And that hasn't been enough to maintain the pond
at its very highest level.
It's just sinking slowly, but it's still maintained.
There's still input of water.
I'm pretty sure you can't see,
'cause that's now below surface level.
Jack reckons that there is still a hole here at the bottom.
We tried puddling it during the year.
Adam and I got in here in our boots, mainly Adam
and I must say hats off to him.
He spent a full morning, really hard work,
struggling through the mud to squash it down
and then it rained a bit
and we could see that it still wasn't holding water.
Okay, people have said put in ducks and pigs,
well, that's all very well.
You've got to have quite a bit of fencing
and all that kind of thing.
Oh, maybe it's an option looking ahead.
And then a guy appeared in May out of the blue,
it's fantastic, with some bentonite clay.
It's 13th of May, and in the four months since
this pond was created it's mainly been going down
and there's now not much water,
but it's pretty stable at the very low level that's left.
We have a puddle.
Has a few tadpoles in actually.
And I've had a fantastic offer from some neighbours,
Brendan, who's a chemical engineer and his mate, Ben.
And they have brought some bentonite clay.
And if you see what they're doing,
they're pushing it into the cracks.
What it turns out is this clay here,
Brendan has been explaining, is not strictly like,
it's not like potter's clay, it's called mud rock.
And it has too many bits in for the water
to not be able to flow through.
It doesn't make a proper seal.
So this bentonite clay is very liquid
and it goes almost liquid when it's damp.
And if you can get it into these cracks
and then we're going to water it,
you will have to use a hose to refill the pond.
So here we are, four hours later,
and Brendan and Ben have done a great job
of putting in the clay
and Brendan is going to explain to you what they've done.
- Okay, hi there.
Yeah, so we've brought 125 kilos
of sodium bentonite clay with us today.
And we very carefully sprinkled it
all the way along, targeting the areas
where there were the biggest cracks.
But basically, we put a fine layer over the entire thing.
We've brushed it in as we've gone,
so we've gone multiple sort of times.
And 'cause you don't want it to clag
you want it to go right down to the bottom of the cracks
and coat all the cracks.
And then we've scarified the surface
with just a very lightweight
garden moss remover or scarifier.
And 'cause you only want to break up that top centimetre.
And then that's all been brushed in,
'cause that's all clay.
And already now you can't see any of the cracks.
So we brushed it all in,
and then we've wet it all on the top,
just to stop the clay from blowing around in the wind.
And also, if it does rain you don't want
little rivulets washing the clay down.
And so yeah, overnight I anticipate
that putting in about 15,000 litres of water,
looking at the flow rate on there.
And hopefully, you'll be in a good position from now on.
- But again, it didn't hold.
There is bentonite clay now.
I'm still hoping that the weight of the water
maybe will push it down and it could still settle.
Jack was saying maybe, you know, it's not a deep pond.
When he was digging, below the clay
looks like there might be rock.
And this is perhaps the point here
that it's not pure pond clay, if you like,
it's something called grit,
grit soil or grit clay.
It's got bits of stone in the clay.
And in that case, maybe it'll never work.
I hope that's not the case.
Oh, why do I want a pond?
Why am I messing around with all this?
I want the wildlife, this is nothing
about irrigating the garden, it's for wildlife.
And we have already had fantastic wildlife here.
We see quite a few dragonflies and the amphibians,
which we also have in the garden as a whole.
And they're great for, toads eat slugs,
all that kind of thing.
And also, one great feature that you get with a pond
is the edge, and with the clay heaped around the edge,
the poor soil because it's clay.
We sowed some wildflowers in February
and had a fantastic wildflower selection here
through the summer.
It was really a joy.
And we're slowly finding time to do some more planting.
Haven't done as much as as we could have.
It's another project.
But this will go on it, it's a long-term project.
It's probably never going to reach an endpoint
of being perfectly full all the time.
But it's a fantastic chance to interact with water
and nature and plants and flowers and wildlife.
(gentle music)