At the Bottom of the Garden: Part Two

Last week, I wrote about my recurring battles with the abomination that used to be our garden pond.

Well today my dad and brother finally got around to helping me sort it out properly.

What we removed from the swamp (most quantities estimates):

• Nearly a mile of marsh marigold stems
• Two or three pounds of dead leaves
• Two golf balls
• An entire rockery
• One inexplicable Christmas-tree bauble which certainly never belonged to us
• Four or five pounds of moss
• At least twelve pounds of silty roots and unidentifiable things
• About twenty litres of primordial ooze

What is left in the pond:

• Two marsh marigolds
• About ten yards of pondweed
• Enough silt to cover the bottom of the liner
• A couple of dozen tadpoles
• A few snails
• Two swamp beasts (to the uninitiated, they would appear to be mere frogs, but we know better)

So we have tamed the swamp, but I doubt that it will take very long for it to be well-covered with a thick growth of weed, and by next year it will probably be well on its way to being thoroughly choked again.

I also tried to tame our resident triffid (which to the inexperienced eye would seem to be no more than a large and unruly rosebush), but gave up when it bit me painfully in the thumb.