Pond Life

Nick has been working hard on the pond, scooping out a lot of dead oxygenating plants that perished during the cold winter, and trying to bring the bulrushes, which have appeared uninvited, under some sort of control.

He has tried out all sorts of specialist instruments to undertake these aquatic tasks, but has finally concluded that the best thing to use is a good old garden rake. In fact one ‘pond expert’ website agrees that a rake is the best implement for many pond related jobs.  It would be good if someone could create a model with an extra long handle however.

As the spring has progressed we have noticed quite a lot of insect life on warm evenings, which clearly pleases the newts. 

A couple of days ago Nick claimed to have seen a shrimp in the water!

I was very excited, anticipating getting the frying pan and the thai spices out, but knew really that it couldn’t be a proper prawn.  In fact it was a ‘nymph’ .  Readers may be disappointed to learn that these are not the nymphs found in fairy tales, (the sort that have a habit of falling for human princes and coming to a bad end on dry land).  They are the larvae of the dragonfly, of which we had a good many last year and are anticipating a lot more in 2011.