Still lining.....after all these years

Ceefa cat was very nearly the first casualty of the pond - he couldn't resist jumping onto the fleece liner to have a closer look at the underside of the butyl. It was only the lump that gave him away. It's no wonder Himself calls him 'Einstein'!

With the liner mostly in place, we could tickle about with the fine tuning of getting neat folds in the butyl, making smooth areas under pipework so that it wouldn't rub, double checking for cat shaped lumps and that sort of thing!

It took 6 of us about three hours to do both the fleece and the butyl liner - which maybe gives you some sense of the size of the pond. (or maybe we were more disorganised than the photos suggest?!)

A moment of great joy and excitment - for me anyway!

After almost a year of working on the garden I was finally getting water into my pond - and into my socks! Yes, that's right, I wasn't watching the water and it snuck up on me - much to the amusement of everyone else. I'm just a source of amusement some days - ho hum!

The pond took a good couple of hours to fill up with a hosepipe as it holds 5000 litres- and we're on a water meter. I was half expecting a phone call from the water board to ask us if we'd got a leak somewhere!

I love messing about in water. I was trying to get the butyl folds as smooth as possible because we were going to put some large rocks on the shelf and I didn't want any sticky-up bits to snag on the rocks and cause holes.

You can see that behind where I'm squatting the soil dips down. This is where I'd started roughly digging out the route for the stream ages ago.

ROCKS - I haven't mentioned the rocks!!!

As you can see in the photo below, there are lots of rocks - big rocks, little rocks, medium sized rocks and about half a dozen wacking great HUGE rocks, plus boulders, pebbles and pea gravel. Obviously we didn't dig these up from the pond hole, we went to a local quarry. Strange how easily you can hide an enormous quarry in Derbyshire!

When we eventually found the quarry we chose the rocks nearest in colour to our own garden rocks - Himself having thought to take a small rock with us for the outing. What a man, eh? We then ordered 9 tons of assorted sizes which were duely delivered a couple of weeks later.

A few minor hiccups were that: firstly, the lorry struggled to get up the drive -long, steep, bendy, lots of trees. Then he couldn't off-load all the pallets onto the yard area by the garage because he'd had to reverse up the drive and his grab arm thingy was then at the wrong end for unloading some of the pallets, so he could only unload about half of them onto the yard. He had to go back down the drive and deposit the rest on the turning area. We then had to use our trusty Land Rover (oh, how I love that vehicle - but that's another story!) to drag the pallets onto the yard. Then there was the minor problem of how to get the rocks from the yard to the Japanese Garden - about 100 metres, uphill, over grass! More on this later.

(for any Americans reading this, in Britain a yard is the hard standing area at the back of the house -usually paved, concreted or tarmaced. Anything else is referred to as the garden).

I know you've seen this photo before, but it really does sum up how happy I was to have finally gotten water in my pond - and I'd put dry socks on by this point too!

It's amazing how quickly water attracts wildlife!

Rachael, Laura, Owen and Jacob(L to R) reckoned they'd earned the right to paddle after all their hard pond-lining work.

The yard is behind Jacob, below the trampoline just to the left of the Land Rover and the car - just to help you visualise how far we'd got to move the rocks!