I love my pond.

It’s only a couple of feet long and a couple of feet deep at its deepest.

It has brought huge happiness into our lives. I am pretty sure it the only reasons I have a garden – because it distracts my children and instead of trashing the garden or playing football, they spend ages gazing into the pond.

We have frogs and toads and snails (2 kinds!) and hairy water lice and freshwater clams; we once found the skeleton of a water spider, the birds come and bath in it in the summer and the foxes poo round it in the night. But….

It is hard work! Everyone says get a pond, it will be easy, nature will take over. It will thrive. But that’s not what happened in our pond.

It has taken more work than any other square foot of my garden. It has brought more concentrated joy than any other square foot but it is a lot of work.

It need lots of clearing and cleaning. I’ve dug it out three times and the last time we had to pay to have it done professionally (so hopefully no more).

It is very hard dealing with pond weed (normal garden plant knowledge doesn’t seem to apply. It needs the right amount of sun – not too much not too little and it can only have rain water in it, which is tricky when it gets really dry.

And all advice about having “small” ponds (once you’ve got one) turns out to be about ponds at least 10ft wide. And you can’t get ANYONE to realistically tell you when you can do serious maintenance as everyone says something different.

And though we have many many frogs, and sometimes spawn, we never have tadpoles. We have to get them in a jam jar from school – which isn’t right I know because of disease – but they seem to live very happily, wiggle into becoming frogs and the hop off around the garden (and then most of them get eaten by cats).

I would always have one – I would never get rid of it now and I’d even maybe like a bigger one – but it is hard work..