The Winter work continues

It is fantastic that for the first time this year we have a proper layer of fallen leaves among the new trees, which will hopefully keep the grass down and allow some of the woodland plants to start getting established. However this amount of leaf fall also created a new job - raking the path so that the grass on the footpath was not killed off by a covering of leaves. As these before and after pictures show it makes quite a difference.

Another large task has been to clear back some of the overgrown bushes and vegetation from the boggy area that we dignify with the name of a pond.

Overgrown 'pond' area before clearance

This is an area that was dug out about 20 years ago, but it was dug in line with a ditch/stream that has a lot of agricultural run-off, so it is very silted up and will never be a nice pond. However as a boggy area it is excellent with frogs, toads and lots of bog plants. (I read that if you are making a pond it ought not to be in continuity with the ditch, but have a back channel leading to the pond to prevent silting). Maybe one day we will get a digger to remake a better pond into a much larger feature - but in the meantime I will continue to hack back the blackthorn and pull up great hairy willow herb.