{"id":26408,"date":"2020-09-09T11:28:43","date_gmt":"2020-09-09T09:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=26408"},"modified":"2020-09-09T11:28:45","modified_gmt":"2020-09-09T09:28:45","slug":"the-mini-pond-and-marginal-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=26408","title":{"rendered":"The mini-pond and marginal areas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My house was given the name Bergstua by the previous owners, literally meaning house on the rock, a rocky hillside overlooking the fjord. Not a natural place for a pond. I wanted to have a pond somewhere, initially mainly for wildlife, habitat for frogs, drinking water for birds etc.\u00a0
I eventually chose a small depression in the rock where the previous owners had presumably blasted a hole in order to erect a flagpole. Not being one for flags, I decided to convert this area into a pond and this involved removing both the metal support and concrete base and this took a couple of years of hard work as I also wanted to avoid machines. If it was feasible by hand I would do it by hand, even resisting an electric drill\u00a0 for many years. I used to come home from work and spent half an hour every day hacking at the concrete with a metal digging bar and when that was eventually removed deepening the depression in the shale-like rock (phyllite).
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The hedge you can see behind the pond was Cotoneaster lucidus <\/em>which has non-edible berries that not even birds take until they are desperate. We bought a rubber liner for the pond in the UK on one of our trips to visit family. I initially filled the pond and the boggy marginal areas with wild plants and creatures like water boatmen and frog spawn from lakes in the area, but regretted a few of the introductions like Equisetum fluviatile<\/em> (swamp horsetail). The frogs never really thrived but a few survived for a few years and one took up residence in our septic tank…
I later gradually converted the pond to an edible pond and the hedge behind was dug out and replaced by a diverse edible\/bird friendly hedge including Morus alba<\/em>, Crataegus<\/em>, Viburnum edule<\/em>, Sambucus nigra<\/em> “Variegata”, Viburnum opulus<\/em>, Amelanchier <\/em>“Thiessen”, Rosa<\/em> spp., Staphylea<\/em> (bladder nut) and a few others. About 10 years ago, I overhauled the pond, digging out all the soil and replanting from scratch in order to remove all the horsetail and other aggressive plants. Below is a video of my little collection of water and bog plants this week and below the video is\u00a0 list of plants we see:<\/p>\n