Relaying/lining pond - advice please

[malumbu]

Relaying garden pond - advice and experience.

We inherited an oblong featureless garden pond, made from brick which seemed to be lined by plywood. The ply was aging. But it attracted numerous newts and frogs.

So I replaced it with a sculpted plastic one. Yes plastic - pretty leak proof but never attracted the range of wildlife and will soon be found for sale on the EDF (tenner and its yours).

I'll simply get some pond liner and use the original brick one

Dome some research but not found out the best time to do this.

On the flora side, pond weed and water irises have done very well, so well I've had to cull some of this and give away via this site. Can't stop the duck weed.

Great to hear views of SE22 and beyond.

[malumbu]

Malumbu - I wouldn't go for the PVC ones, as well as being environmentally unsound, not as reliable as a synthetic rubber. You could try Shannons in Forest Hill

[malumbu]

Thanks Malumbu, not really a fan of that garden centre - others may disagree. There is a pet shop in Sydenham that stocks fish and other aquatic things but not sure if they do this sort of thing. I'm avoiding Pets at Home as they are selling Halloween outfits for dogs. That is just to odd, and deserves a thread in its own right.

https://www.petsathome.com/shop/en/pets/halloween-feature

Anyone else apart from Malumbu and I have any views?

[kiera]

You asked when would be the best time to change your pond. I would suggest summer if you have amphibians in the pond currently. In autumn & winter they could be hibernating in the mud at the bottom and in spring they would be breeding, so I would wait until after tadpoles have turned into froglets and left the pond, so, I would suggest August.

I apologise if I'm telling you things you already know, but I recommend that you buy a good quality liner - inferior ones can start to disintegrate in sunlight - & that you put a soft layer on top of the bricks to lay it on, otherwise, the weight of the water could cause a puncture in the liner if it's laid directly on the bricks, which could have sharp corners. Also, to make sure amphibians have places where they can crawl in and out.

[malumbu]

That's great thanks. There's on an on-line retailer that do kits with a lining too. I sensed that the cheap ones would be a false economy. I never worked out why my molded pond was much less wildlife friendly than the featureless rectangular one it replaced, think it was because the simple one held much more water and the new one become too cluttered with flora. Or perhaps newts and frogs are declining in the area?

[Dark Knight]

Newts and frogs have a predator / prey relationship:

"Newts eat tadpoles, so ponds with lots of newts tend to have fewer frogs. But then a decrease in frogs means fewer tadpoles and so less food available to newts, which can lead to fewer newts and so more frogs in following years - and so on."

--sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk

Another factor that may help explain your observation is the global decline in amphibian populations over the past few decades.

[malumbu]

We had some nasty fungus that killed loads of frogs in the 00s. See them occasionally now, but as you pointed out the newts will eat the tadpoles so they can't breed.

[kiera]

Years ago, when I made a pond (in E.Dulwich). I put a large clump of reeds in it and some goldfish. Frogs, toads and newts must have been in the area, as they all appeared in the pond, along with pond creatures such as water boatmen, pond skaters and damselflies. They all bred - plenty of predators in that mix, but also plenty of cover for the fish fry and tadpoles, so plenty of the young survived. Luckily, my frogs didn't get that fungus disease.

I don't think we have the same local reserves of amphibians and other wildlife for a pond to colonise naturally like that now - too many ponds have been filled in, garden areas diminished to make way for house extensions/patios and solid fences put up which prevent free movement between gardens of amphibians etc which restricts them to such an extent that they can't survive, such as seems to have happened with hedgehogs, which disappeared from my garden quite some years ago.