A Wildlife Farming Essential - The Pond

Water. An essential for life. On a wildlife farm, ponds are a vital component of building an eco-system, offering homes and a waterhole for the creature’s you’re trying to attract. At Brimwood Farm, I have two natural ponds that I’m restoring. I will also be creating a new pond for the waterfowl and adding another small pool outside the polytunnel as part of the permaculture design - but more on that in another post. For now, my focus is on the current infrastructure and making the most of what I’ve got: an important concept for creating any garden, smallholding or farm.

The autumnal pond after a good cut back.

For the past two years, I’ve been cutting back overgrown shrubs, scything back weeds and letting sunlight onto water. I began with the hill meadow pond, but after being attacked by bees, I decided that stabby little buzzlings hampered the pleasure of working, so I moved to the back meadow pond where my focus has remained. I shall, at some point, return to the other pond once the queens have been replaced for slightly less aggressive counterparts and harmony has been restored.

During year one, the main emphasis was on clearing brambles and opening up the canopy. It’s good for ponds to have some shade, but deciduous trees drop all their leaves into the water come autumn, hindering any process to eradicate a stagnant soup. Like all eco-systems, you need to think of a pond as a connection of multiple habitats. You need shade and sunspots, shallows and deeper waters, patches of clear water’s edge and areas thick with foliage.

The back meadow pond is far larger than I realised, so clearing continues even two years later. However, earlier this spring (year two), I discovered frogspawn and you can see in the video below, the progress made so far. Watch the playlist to see the full restoration.

My natural ponds are not, as you might initially think, watering holes for future livestock - sheep, cattle etc. Instead, they’re a wildlife oasis. For example, a thriving frog population helps battle slugs and insects in a no-chemical market farm garden. Dragonflies conduct a similar benefit. Meanwhile, many predators require a larger water source as they don’t satisfy their thirst from nibbling wet vegetation, for example. So to naturally keep a rabbit population under control, I need foxes and stoats and weasels. And a water source is important.

There is also, of course, the mental health benefits of having ponds. There is something soothing about water, whether it’s poking about in the shallows watching ‘wib wobs’ (that’s mosquito larvae or daphnia if you’re foreign to my childhood language) or watching dragonflies flit over the surface.

In addition to clearing, I’ve begun to plant both the pond and the water’s edge with natives to provide nectar, foliage and beauty. Plants such as primrose (similar to those pictured) and foxglove offer some earlier flowers for insects to feed from. The leaves of foxglove especially, also provides shelter for smaller animals like rodents which may want to sneak down to the water’s edge. Meanwhile, water plantain, forget-me-not, mint and Yellow Flag iris have been added to the edge, and I aim to pop in some lillies later this year to provide material and shade in deeper areas.

The plan is to create a lush and diversely planted pond, both in the water and along the edge. For the most part, natives will be used though I’m not adverse to using cultivars that offer benefits - for example those that fill a seasonal gap in flowering or offer additional nectar for bees and butterflies to sip from during the year.

I finally feel the pond is getting somewhere, and it’s heartening to see the plants doing well and knowing that frogspawn has been laid once. Let’s hope that in 2020, amphibians return and, this time, the pond is a more hospitable place for their offspring to hatch and grow.