So this was the weekend that we had hoped to finish and prepare our original hole get the liner in. There was quite a bit of preparation work involved as the sides of pond were not level and therefore needed to be built up along with marginal shelves to hold the plants that we intend to put into baskets instead of straight into the soil as we had previously done. This had been a big mistake because once they had taken hold (this took about 4 years) they all became very invasive and caused us all sorts of problems.
So here we are, emptying the pond of water, I have already levelled the edge.
The weather forecast had said that there would be rain on the Saturday and the Sunday would be fine. Our plan was to get everything prepared and the liner installed and pond filled on Sunday.
So we carried on emptying it, Alex was my animal rescuer, until about 1:30pm when I looked up and saw a beautiful blue sky within seconds we had decided to put the liner in today.
So that's what we did, the bottom 75mm of the pond has a layer of top soil in which we put our native water lilies (N.Alba) in the 2 baskets
By the end of that Saturday the pond looked like this and once again Sue and I slept well.
By the end of Sunday after we had spent many hours discussing what we we going to do with the edge of the pond we came to a sort of compromise. (Sue told me what she wanted, I agreed)
As much as it is against our ideals to have paving stones around a wildlife pond from our experience over the last eight years we feel it's the best thing to do. The area in te top left we be grass and a butterfly/bee border and at the far end of the pond (the shallow end) will be a 'beach' of cobbles.