Pond replanning

It now seems an age ago that we decided to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and created a huge ditch across the front lawn with believe it or not a raised water feature to try and help the drainage issue in front of the main house. Whilst the victorians were definitely shrewd architects locating the house behind a slight rise in the land to allow it both views out to the ocean and a layer of protection from winter storms and wind when it really blows they were not so clever at there lawn management.

The front lawn is formed behind a bank of raised beach which had allowed itself over time to become a reservoir for peat and as we all now know from digging around on the golf course peat is not the best medium for drainage. The plan with the front lawn had been to dig through the peat and create a natural drainage line for the excess water to escape. This has worked in many ways however we neglected to include the fact that peat seems to be a magnet for the rain and therefore it seems to retain much of the water that falls from the sky leaving it to remain damp, at least, underfoot in most conditions.

However we also decided that in order to break the view and to help the local wildlife and flora we would create a simple pond, and to make this safe- health and safety as ever being on our minds-  we made it shallow but this therefore gave issues with getting water to it and insuring the water remained. For this we piped a pond from the hillside to import the water and lined it again with peat but this seemed to work well until the weed started to overtake the pond and no amount of wading and pulling of weed seemed to keep it under control so this week we removed by mechanical extraction much f the excess weed and cleaned out the boundaries of the pond leaving a much improved vista. Especially as with a bit of snow on the ground last night any devastation caused by the tracked vehicles removing the debris was all covered in a white layer of snow.

Anyway as ever it is progress and now we will wait for spring and the new grass to recover and camouflage the paths and hopefully by May the water Lillie's will have returned and all will be right with the world!