The Pond
The finishing touches
When we arrived back at the school on the Sunday morning, the pond was full of water for the first time – but there was still much work to do!
The excess liner and protective layers needed to be trimmed. The rubber pond liner was easy, but the protective layer lived up to its name and resisted close attention from scissors and knives. After much perseverence though we now had the bare bones of our pond in place.
Once the trimming was finished, the next task was to cover the exposed edges of the liner with turf that we had saved from when the hole was dug.
All the debris from the road that we discovered had been piled to the side of the pond. This was covered with soil and sand to create the conditions for a sunny wildflower bank that would be created later.
Another important job that we needed to finish before the end of the weekend and the school reopened on Tuesday was the creation of a fence surrounding the pond. We needed this for health and safety reasons – ponds can be dangerous places! While we wanted the children to benefit from the pond, we certainly wanted to eliminate any chance of accidents!
We chose to erect a post and wire fence to support chestnut paling that was 4 feet (1.2m) high. It would look quite obtrusive at first, but the wood mellows with age and would be increasingly hidden by plants.
And to cap what was another wonderful day’s work, we found what was possibly the first creature to have colonised our new pond – only twelve hours after it was filled! A pond skater obviously took a shine to the surface of the pond and chose to land here and call it home…