![Bouncing Happy :-()](./images/smilies/bigmsile.gif)
...spent the morning digging my little pond. I had started working on it this spring, but aborted due to being overwhelmed by other gardening chores and heat. So it just needed to be cleared of weeds, dug a little more and shaped, and pond liner laid out.
This is a project that has been off and on or several years now. You might wonder why I would be digging a pond now just before winter. Part of the problem with it has been that other times of the year, it's impossible.
- Late winter-Early spring, the ground and any moisture/water in the half dug dimple in the ground was frozen. Tried and gave up several times.
- spring time turned out I was too busy with other stuff. But I was also concerned about disturbing praying mantis egg casings, etc. That I had spotted in there.
- early summer - by this time, the weeds had taken off and the area had to be cleared, and everything looked too daunting. Lots of planting and gardening to get everything growing well were going on, too.
- summer was too hot -- I could barely get what needed to be watered and weeded and harvested done before I was overcome from heat prostration. Plus there were milkweed growing really well that I wanted to keep growing for the Monarch butterflies
- fall -- that entire area was lush with goldenrod, flea bane, and stinging nettle. Carelessly trying to pull weeds got me stung several times.
- late fall - NOW - was perfect. A couple of hard frosts had killed off tender annuals and it was much easier to see what was growing, beneficial insects like bees, wasps, spiders, are mostly gone and with the weeds that were left to mostly sticks, it was for praying mantis egg casings.
Today, it was 50's cold, but warm enough for digging in short sleeves.
![Very Happy :()](./images/smilies/biggrin.gif)
-- photo from upstairs window -- Too exhausted now to do anything else, but I'll fill with water in the next couple of days to make sure the pond liner in mostly positioned the way I want, then I can bury the edges and put more rocks around it.
I'll think about additional features like waterfall and the little recirculating stream I want to connect to it, skimmer filter, etc. next spring.
Would it be better to cover this with bird netting to keep out leaves and debris, or would that be more trouble than it's worth and it's not that big a deal to scoop out debris, etc. later?