Pond or giant cow pat?

We are into our eleventh year living on the Boggy Brae and although there have been dry spells, especially in spring, we think the current one is the longest we have experienced.  A couple of days ago, before the water in the pond had evaporated completely, Toad and I went down there with plastic buckets and scooped out a lot of the accumulated mud. It did indeed look like cow manure but wasn't as pongy. It has now formed a dry crust where we flung it around the edges.

crusty pond sludge

The low water made it easy for me to set in some pond plants that a neighbour gave me. They are in the left of the first photo. You might be able to make out some upright sticks in the foreground: they are marking wild angelica plants. The combined number around the pond and around the flag patch comes to about 50 now.

Near the king cups that the same neighbour also gave me (the ones that got eaten by the deer), I found some primula leaves. I put a cage round them as well. Turns out they are a pink-flowering variety.

Meanwhile my fight with the rhododendrons and snowberry growing around the oil pipe continues. The dry spell has been very useful for getting on with this as I've been able to burn the small stuff and stack the big stuff to let it dry our before we can use it in the stove.

monstrous rhododendrons and a pipe

I've often wished while hacking away at this stuff that I could just set it on fire but if oil vapour inside the pipe were to get hot enough to expand... let's not go there! I'm up to the last rhodie but it's extensive. After that I've only got about 16 metres of spiraea and snowberry to go at.

Meadow Buttercups and hawthorn have begun flowering today in other parts of the garden.

meadow buttercup

Steps to the pond

Toad decided to dig a pond in the summer of 2008. Toadlet (7) helped by leaning artistically on whichever tool he wasn't using. The chickens investigated.

Then the pond triangle, at the lowest part of the garden, was left to go wild. Toad is not really a gardener so upkeep didn't cross his mind before he dug the pond. I was too busy struggling to get the rest of the garden, which measures about 90x30 metres, and which had been neglected for about twenty-five years, under some sort of control. Then my energy ran out and I've had to pace myself. And Toad still isn't a gardener 😁. If I leave him a polite note, giving him plenty of notice to get used to the idea in advance, he will mow a section of lawn on a sunny day like today. Given the bogginess and the slope of the land that's a hard job so it helps a lot, leaving me time and energy to hack my way into the pond triangle in what I hope will be a sustainable way.

I made the mistake at first of cutting the many old and monstrous rhododendrons down. I now realise that it's probably better to cut them up, that is to raise their canopies and prevent any side branches from bridging and rooting, which is what Rhododendron ponticum likes to do.

So now I am cutting between the rhododendrons that were planted long ago for a hedge and am going to let them increase in height but not in width.  Another of the pluses of this approach is that I can see the pond from the inside the house.

Making a footpath and sight path to the pond

Today, at the steepest part above the pond, I made a step. I'm dead chuffed with it; never made a step before. I found a suitable piece of wood next to the washing machine (as you do if you're me and have a cluttered old wash-house full of things that might be useful one day, and things that are already useful, I hasten to add!) and walloped some very dead branches of rhododendron wood into the ground to hold a stone and the wood in place. I think I'll make another step down from that too because in wet weather it can be very slippery down there and there's no point increasing the rate of erosion if one can avoid it. There's another similar piece of wood in the shed. As I hack back the overgrown bushes I'm making woodpiles. There will be bonfires in due course.



All these piles are now bigger than they were when I took these photos and there are two more green ones.

Below are two pond watchers a year or so after it was dug.

 Meanwhile, on another garden step, one of those going up to the shed, this year's first Boggy Brae violet is flowering. Wild cherry trees are beginning to flower too.

Wild cherry blossom

Twigs and beasties

I had left a bundle of fuchsia sticks on top of the garden wall. This morning I went down with a piece of string to tie them up and add them to the coal sackful of roots, brambles and other twigs that I was going to take to the dump. I used to shred all this sort of stuff but I think that the dust and vapour from plant shredding is one of the things that does my head in (in a painful clogged up hay feverish sort of way) so I do less of it nowadays.

Underneath the bundle was this shiny beetle. I managed to get a pic before it ran away. Look how grainy the top of the wall is where moss and ivy have worked on it!

Then I noticed a whole crowd of beasties: millipedes and more beetles. The picture isn't very well focussed, I'm afraid.

Then they all ran away and I felt like a rotter for removing their roof!

Meanwhile the pond had a certain tadpoley wriggliness about it in all the shallow parts. Sorry, no pic of tadpoles just my favourite pond edging of tiny Opposite-leaved Golden Saxifrage plants.

Monster fuchsia work continues

The question was what to do with the remaining (still loads!)  of monster fuchsia stems now that space to stack them on the far side of the lane as dead hedging (fourth photo in this post; I live in hope that they will actually die!) is running out. I thought I could do a neat stacking between some of the stems I've left by the pond. Trouble is, if you lie cut fuchsia on the wet ground here (the ground is mostly wet) it will send down roots. Then I remembered two pieces of breeze block so I've placed them to hold the stems (trunks really) off the ground. This is what it looked like yesterday. I wonder how visible the stacked stems (there will be a lot more) will be when the still rooted, upright trunks are in full leaf?

This pile → that Toad cut out of the ridiculous rhododendron hedge back in December I stuffed into the back of the Rattletrap to take to the municipal dump, either just on a tarpaulin or, the smaller bits anyway, into an old coal sack that fell of the back of a lorry.

coal sack for garden waste

It really did fall off a lorry! And there were about half a dozen others stuffed into it. When we get our next delivery of coal I'll give them back to the coal merchant. The day they blew off was very windy and the lump in the road was making drivers nervous so I stopped, investigated and picked them up. They'd only have landed in the sea else. Might as well use them. I might hang them on a line to get rained on and cleaned up a bit. The others are all muckier than that one.

Working on the northwestern side of the pond (onto which I'd never got before because of the fuchsia-brambly undergrowth), making myself a path around it, hacking back fuchsia and yanking out trip wires of ivy, I came across the edge of what at first I thought was a stone. It turned out to be a lid of some kind about ten inches wide. It had clearly had a spongey lining so my guess was that it was the lid of a make-up box or something. The first word I found hard to make out but I think the whole thing is Amway La Collection Classique, Paris. According to that link, Amway made expensive perfumes and after shaves. So my guess wasn't far out.

What is baffling is how it got into the mud at the bottom of the Boggy Brae garden! Maybe it blew in; maybe someone threw it there in a hissy fit; maybe the lid was used by kids as a frisbee. 😀

So now, looking southeastwards from the boggy bottom north corner, this is what the pond triangle is looking like. Those fern stumps don't look much just now but they will explode into great cones over the spring and summer. You can see how raggy the Ridiculous Rhodo hedge is on this its lower side. I've managed to keep the upper side, that edges the drive, reasonably under control. My big project this year is to cut back some of this side. I'll need to hold back if I find nesting birds are using it, though this part isn't the thickest.
Further to the right, it's like a dark cave! If Rhododendron ponticum weren't such a savage invader, I'd leave the hedge messy, but at the very least I want to yank out the bridging, rooting shoots. There's also our oil supply pipe to get at, that Toad's going to scrub with a wire brush and paint sometime. Aye, right! 😉

cave of rhododendron, snowberry, unwanted ash seedlings, brambles, etc

Here's Scrawny (Scrawny has fans!), which is in the boggy bottom east corner, reflected yesterday in the pond: