It has been a rather wonderful day, frost again this morning but without morning mist. I was a bit disappointed about that but we did have sunshine all day long and once again it went from cold to almost Scandinavian summer temperatures 🙂

So sweater in the morning but after I had been to the grocery store in Falköping I switched to t-shirt. I have around one gazillion of flies in the grass now, I think it might be that they need water, because the grass stays wet for quite some time plus the fact the ground is fairly warm all day. These flies aren’t annoying in any way, they really don’t want to be close to neither me or my dogs but as soon as we get too close they fly up in the air and the sound from them is amazing 🙂 🙂 This is so to speak their final show so I don’t care about them.

So I started this project yesterday. I was walking around in the garden and saw an old plastic pot I’ve dug down in to the ground. I had done that because I wanted black berries in the garden but in just one place. So the pot was there to keep the roots in one place. The thing is that the blackberry bushes slowly and steadily became smaller for each year until they were no more and for some reason I just didn’t remove the pot. So I looked at the pot, rather big to be honest and wondered what to do with it. I must have brought it with me when I closed my garden center. It’s around 120 litres (31,7 gallon US) and then I looked at some rubber sheet I still had after the voles destroyed my pond. So why not make a little pond from that instead of the readymade little pond I was wondering if I could repair?

So I dug out all the soil that filled the pot witch made my morning a bit hellish because I apparently have muscles I don’t know of 🙂 🙂 I actually tried to lift the pot up from the ground but it was just impossible. So I brought the rubber sheet and started to preparing the surface around the pot. It isn’t easy to try and force down a rubber sheet in a rather small space and one has to forget a big rule when making a pot, the rubber shouldn’t be folded but absolutely smooth around the edges. That works well if one actually is making a big pond but not when forcing it down in to a fairly small space 🙂 🙂 🙂 Before that though I had dug a sort of moat around the pot, that will be the future swamp zone. That’s where plants that loves to grow in swampy areas but not below the water surface can live.

When I had done my best to adjust the rubber sheet to it all (the easiest way to get the sheet down to the bottom of the little pond is to just start filling it with water) with lots of folds everywhere 🙂 🙂 🙂 I started to cut off the unnecessary parts of the sheet. That is of course best to do with a carpenter knife, preferable the ones with a razor blade in it. Or if You like me can’t find it one can use that bl…y expensive bread knife that is completely useless except for it is so sharp it’s possible to cut down a tree with it. After that just start to cover the rubber sheet that is outside of what it is supposed to be with soil. This one will be empty until next spring so I just poured out those wood chips I had after the compost grinder. It is a good thing to use a water measure so that it’s even, otherwise there will be problems if it rains too much.

So that’s what I’ve been doing today and the problem is that it really made me start to think about making a big pond again, too pricy to do that at the moment so this little one will have to do. This one will be big enough for three or four gold fish, they will eat any mosquito larvae or other fly larvae who will try and grow up there 🙂 This one is not deep enough to keep them alive during winter so I’ll see what I need to do before then. Well it is time for that last cup of tea and since there’s absolutely nothing I want to watch on tv it might be an early night, I’ll just have to check for badgers in the garden before I let the dogs out 🙂

Have a great day!