Pond life - a fishy business

Carpomath:   If Alan buys 5 goldfish and I buy 2 shubunkins, how many fish are there in the pond?
Answer seems to be (sadly) only 6 large fish (cat? heron?) but (happily) quite a few very small fish :)

What a difference a day makes (reprise)

 Now doesn't that look nice!  A glorious summer's day...

...umm... well, at least the pond/bog garden is now completely full and we've retested the 'full' level setting and drain point.  Please may we have summer back now?

Breaking rocks in the hot sun...

...I fought the law, oh no, I filled the gabions.

And it has been hot work over the last few days!  The blue snake is the conduit for the pump cable; and the black snake is the hose which will carry the water from the pump round the back into the gabions and then out through a rill back into the pond.  Once, that is, we have found someone to do the stainless steel fabrication to make the rill base.  So I guess I'd better produce a drawing or two...
You can see the bog garden is now apparently all mud but the pond water level is a bit low so we have to find more topsoil from somewhere...




If you look at this view it looks pretty much finished.  Good eh?

Alan meanwhile has completely dismantled two of the the three stable panels that formed the end stable, we hope this will provide enough framework and cladding to repair the rest of the block.

Veg update - still got some of the last of the spring cabbage; french beans going into full production mode; courgettes en route; cucumber glut; garlic harvest very disappointing.  Salad stuffs various about the place.  Strawberry harvest (now over) was excellent.  International Kidney new pots possibly the best flavour we've ever grown apart from Pink Fir Apple.

Gonna tear your playhouse down

Finally the running-around level has declined just far enough to allow time for a post - and indeed for some post-worthy activity to have occurred.
We got back from the Worlds in Zbraslavice to find that the garden was coming on apace - particularly the weeds, which I just had time to wrestle into a bit of submission prior to departing for the Club Class.  We're very pleased with how the patio flower bed is looking:

July is planned to be a 'rest month' so it's back to heavy gardening again. But first, since the pond has become crystal clear, we visited Porton Garden Centre...












and here they are in the pond.

The excavation at the far end of the pond is for the gabion run to go across; this also provides some earth to fill the bog garden which as you can see still has water visible. We're filling the gabions with all the 'reclaimed' flint we've dug out to get to this point!

And in the stableyard, things are (literally) moving.    Stable:

Unstable.
No neighbours were harmed in the removal of this stable (but it was a close-run thing).

You can't always get what you want....

...this is for JP.  Next post due very soon!

We've got a little list

Today is the end of the year's rectification period so we are updating the snagging list for final resolution.  And here is the pond with the first round of planting settling in.

Taking the pea

This time last year we had just finished erecting the greenhouse.  This time this year we've just harvested the first early crop of peas for our dinner.  Looking forward to the fig harvest later in the year - if you look carefully at the pic below you will see there are two fruit on the plant which is just starting to become a fig fan (as am I!).

All the tender stuff is now out in either the greenhouse or the garden.  We had a very severe frost a couple of weeks ago that took out much new growth, even on very hardy things like beech and roses - I've never seen that before.  Alan's spuds suffered in spite of being wrapped up in two layers of fleece - but they're putting up fresh growth at a rate of knots.  Growth is slowing a little due to the lack of rain - according to the newspaper just 12% of the average during April in our area - I don't normally water things but this is the exception.
House-wise, we are just coming up to the anniversary of signing off the building works so we're due a final inspection and snagging list as soon as we're back from Zbraslavice - Peter the Architect sent me a nice picture of the Pitts Special he's been building so if we're lucky we can celebrate this with a aerobatic display...