‘Thedaywefilledthepondupwith tap water, wildlife started to colonise it’
Greenways development officer Michael Savage (58) is working from his home in Londonderry, in lockdown with his partner Bernadette and daughter Ellie (16). He has just transformed a neglected veg patch into a pond thriving with wildlife.
He has a large garden at his home on the Limavady Road where he had created a vegetable patch and wildflower meadow in previous years.
To make the new pond, he had an idea to transform an area which had been neglected for some time.
“It’s been sitting there not doing anything and was overgrown with weeds, so last year I decided it would be nice to convert it into a pond,” Michael says.
“We bought a pond liner and a pump and then they sat in the garage from last year. When lockdown started and we were stuck here for weeks, it seemed like a good opportunity to do it — it took about a week and a half to complete.”
The veg patch has been built using long-lasting oak that had fallen in the Great Storm, which felled thousands of trees around Europe in 1987 — when Michael bought it at a salvage yard in Coleraine years ago, he was told that the French Government had given permission to plank the fallen oaks.
The first step was to remove all the surface vegetation and then dig out the soil, before picking over the substrate to remove sharp stones and glass shards that could puncture the liner. Michael used some old pond liner and builders’ bags to underlay the new pond liner.
“We wanted to keep a bank that was to become a rockery and cascade. We’ve got mining bees in the garden so I decided it would be nice to have some bare soil that they could burrow in,” he says.
“Down the other end of the pond, I wanted to have a bog garden. For a while it was my job to do school wildlife areas, so I’ve built lots of ponds and they’ve always been fairly naturalistic but this one was more formal in shape than I normally do.
“We got irises from the garden, and we got a scoop of pondweed — crosswort — when we were out on a walk, although it came with some Canadian pondweed and we’re picking that out to make sure it doesn’t get established.
“We bought some marginal plants online — we have a lovely one called flowering rush and there’s lots of water plantain, arrowhead and some camassia, although it’s not taking too well.
“We bought a water lily online and when it arrived it was an inch and a half root and one very sad leaf. That’s struggling to get going, but I think it’s going to survive.”
But as soon as the pond was complete, wildlife started to colonise it, Michael says.
“What was really great was that we filled it up with tap water and just that day things started arriving. We had water beetles, we had pond skaters dropping out of the sky on the first day or two and we found a stonefly.
“It’s too late now for frogspawn but we did manage to get some tadpoles when we were out for a walk. The pond is thriving — it’s a bit soupy at the moment but it’s starting to clear,” he says.