10th April 2021

Sunrise        06:32            Sunset        20:16

This turned out to be a good day in the garden. We listened to Gardeners Corner on BBC Radio Ulster this morning and one of the contributors, Cherry Townsend, made a statement to one of the questions asked. Cherry said when designing a garden take away the straight lines and make more curves. We had done this last year unknowingly when we put a path of 400mm flags up the garden, it did make a vast improvement to the garden. 

Alison and I went up the garden and started planning our new Chrysanthemum bed. We decided to take Cherries advice and instead of an L shaped bed we decided on a crescent shaped bed. We lined it out with bricks and sat down and looked at what we had to do. We decided to remove the bricks lining the old bed and to buy more 400mm flags to edge the new bed. 

This led to us moving the bricks to continue the edging along the Dahlia beds. This improved the look of that greatly. A few more bricks left over edged the lawn beside the arbour and again looks good.

I went to the builders supplies and got some 400mm flags at a good price, almost half the price we paid for the same thing last year. We moved them into place in the garden and sat down. 


We contacted Jayden our grandson and booked him for Monday, he is a great help. 


After lunch we changed direction and decided now was the time to work at the pond. We had put this in 2015 and apart from cleaning each year it did not have a lot of maintenance. I noticed that the water in the pond was draining away when we turned on the pump so it had been turned off over the winter. 
I followed the pipe from the pump in the pond to the reservoir at the top of our little stream and discovered a leak. The pipe broke as I was trying to get it out. We contacted Clearly Aquatics and ordered some new pipe. I went and bought it. When I fitted the new pipe it worked well.

To fit the pipe meant taking the pump from the pond. This led to removing a lot of gunge and overgrown roots, dirty work, but well worth it because the little stream is going better than ever. Tomorrow we can rebuild the rockery, a good days work.
The realigned bricks around the dahlia beds
Bricks outlining the crescent shaped chrysanthemum bed
The pond from the reservoir end

The pond with the pump working but the pipe still to be buried. The water is extremely murky.

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