One of the reasons I was so keen to buy this house was the size of the garden. This is the back third. It has been, and will be again, a vegetable patch. At the moment it’s so overgrown that you can’t see where the individual beds are, so I thought I’d start by doing a bit of gentle clearing.
I thought this readymade circle might be a good base for a little pond. My plan was to take the sticks off the top, shovel the soil into the compost bin, and find out how deep the hole is. Unfortunately the sticks on top turned out to be blackthorn clippings, therefore covered in dirty great spikes, and my gloves aren’t very thick, so it was a slower, more careful process than I’d anticipated.
And then it got weird. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to throw their schoolbag down the bottom of the garden and bury it? Seems obvious, really.
The top layer of sticks (and the schoolbag) removed, I started digging in the soil, only to discover that it was lying on top of another layer of blackthorn clippings that hadn’t even begun to think about decomposing, so there was no way I could chuck everything straight into the compost bin. I had to resort to pulling the branches out from under the compost, very carefully, trying my hardest to avoid the massive thorns.
Which is when I met this fellow…
…who I think is a Common Newt. Definitely a newt of some description, anyway!
And then I met another one…
…and another!
I turned up seven newts altogether. They’re so incredibly well camouflaged against the soil that I resorted to picking them up and putting them temporarily in a bucket, so as not to risk injuring or treading on them. There was one in particular that every time I moved it, it ran for shelter… underneath the toe of my boot. Silly thing.
I now feel terribly bad about digging up their habitat – not least because the entire point of putting a pond into that hole was specifically to encourage newts! Apparently I’ve just saved myself a lot of digging… and the next door neighbours do have quite a big pond, which is presumably where the newts have been mating.
And now my garden looks like this. A hole full of sticks, a pile of sticks that used to be in the hole, a bucket full of things that should never have found their way into the hole in the first place (metal shelf brackets, sweet wrappers, buried plant pots, a huge lump of builders’ sand…), and a temporary newt hotel.
I’m hoping that the newts will be able to take up residence underneath the pile of sticks that used to be in the hole, as I don’t plan on moving that for a while now. I think I would still like to put a little pond in here, but I’ll definitely be leaving a handy pile of sticks somewhere in the garden, for creatures to hide in.