Carnage!

Again, I'm not talking about next-door's cat 😄 I'm sure he must have some nice sunny spots in his own garden, but I half suspect he regards this as his garden too 😏 

I left you on Tuesday, my lovelies, with the grand rediscovery of the wildlife pond ~ which by this point of the dreadful neglect inflicted upon it, was looking rather more like a bog!

Little-by-little, though, we cleared away all the detritus.  I have kept a few of the plants that were here but most of it was overgrown rosa rugosa, fuchsia and weeds all of which I most definitely did not want to keep 😉

This massive piece of sycamore stump was over to the right of the pond.  Once we'd cleared off the stuff that had taken root on it, we were able to roll it away.

I wasn't sure that anyone would be interested as it's a hefty beast, but one of the chaps who took about half of the other logs happily took this as well.  It was quite the feat though for him to get it out of the garden and into his trailer, even with Adrian's assistance 😲

It's not easy to tell from this photo, but the ground does slope away from the wooden retaining wall, so that helped in moving the "giant economy sized" piece of tree stump.

Eventually we will be making a new wildlife area, complete with a (possibly larger) pond, so I have kept a few of the logs to reuse as insect habitat.

Then came the none-too-pleasant task of emptying out the old pond ~ it was a tad stinky and slimy 😒  We were both surprised at the depth of the pre-formed pond we'd used ~ we definitely don't remember digging out quite such a deep hole!

By the time we'd got to this stage, we were both knackered and the area looked like a bomb had hit it 😳  We decided to let the debris from the pond dry out for a couple of days so that it (hopefully) wouldn't be quite so heavy when we bagged it up ready to be taken to the tip.

We can now more easily see what needs to be done in order to bring our plans to fruition.  Our first task of course will be to thoroughly clear the area of weeds, etc, so that we are starting off with a nice clean slate. We then plan to level off the ground as much as is possible ~ that pond hole will come in useful for raking excess soil into 😄  We currently have another little soil mountain out in the back garden (from where we emptied out the raised beds that were previously in the new patio area), so no doubt we will be making use of some of that to finish filling in the pond hole.

Step one of the garden rehash will be to get the raised bed built along the wooden retaining wall.  We have quite a lot of wood stored away that we can hopefully make use of, so fingers crossed that we won't have to spend too much money!  It will also be interesting to see how much of the soil mountain is left once the bed has been filled.  I probably won't relocate any shrubs until later in the year, when we've got the hottest weather out of the way.  There's also bound to be weeds lurking in the soil, so it will be useful to clear out as many of the pesky little blighters as possible before planting any of the shrubs. 

We have a pretty good idea of what we're going to do in this part of the garden but rather than inflicting "information overload" upon you, I'll tell you more about our plans as we go along 😊