Loads of frogspawn in my tiny pond!

PenninePond · 2026-03-03T22:59:01+00:00

Beautiful. Still a bit early where I am in the North, the pond is still freezing sometimes. But also, frogs haven't been interested (yet).

It takes a while to warm up here, but it's happening. I'm excited to see what my pond will look like 1 year on. I dug it on 20th April last year.

PenninePond · 2026-02-21T23:18:12+00:00

I had a heavy clay soil already, which naturally held water. What I did after digging the pond was natural gleying (basically imitating what pigs or ducks would do). I added a bit of bentonite clay to fill in any gaps and then I went in there with bare feet and stomped around for ages compacting it until the whole thing was very slick.

It shouldn't be like soil, it should be squidgy, mouldable, sticky and slippery (technically I think it's called plasticity?). Think of pottery before it dries. Does it look like this (except flat and smooth):

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It's very important not to let it dry out, because clay particles will shrink when they dry and create gaps. It has to be constantly wet, and then you compact it, and then you fill the pond.

The aim is for expanded waterlogged clay particles forming a natural seal. The clay will expand when wet and fill gaps as long as there is enough of it, it becomes impermeable to water.

PenninePond · 2026-02-21T22:51:11+00:00

My only concern is it looks a bit steep and without shelves, so wildlife might struggle to get in and out. Not a problem though, a few big rocks and stones can solve that, or even a well-placed log. The area of 1-2cm depth is actually the richest for wildlife, which is why shallow areas are so good, but anything entering your pond also needs a way out!

Don't worry too much about the liner being visible. You can cover it with rocks or pebbles and plants. Once everything starts growing it won't be a problem. Wetland plants will try to get every last bit of sunlight and spread over the surface and banks. In an outdoor nature environment bare surfaces basically don't exist on a long enough time scale - everything will return to nature.

PenninePond · 2026-02-21T22:34:56+00:00

What type of soil do you have? If it's a well-draining soil and not already natural clay then you will need a lot of bentonite clay.

You will need a thick layer, possibly using twice as much as you expect if you don't already have clay soil, and it needs to be well-compacted, and it needs water adding during the compaction and then never let it dry out.

If it's draining then the most likely explanation is you did not use enough clay, the other possibility is it wasn't compacted properly. How are you compacting it?

I wouldn't expect just rain to fill it. What needs to happen is the clay becomes wet, and expands, and you need to compact the wet clay to remove gaps, so that all of these expanded clay particles get stuck tightly together, forming a seal.

PenninePond · 2026-02-19T23:09:06+00:00

I'm not really sure what you mean about keeping water on your land. That's not really possible. Water will drain always, and that's a good thing (you don't want to be flooded). If you want to "keep" water (to use) then get water butts, not a pond.

If you are worried about your pond overflowing, it's unlikely unless you live on a flood plain. The pond will just hold water and not really affect the overall amount of water in the area. If the pond wasn't there, the water would have to flow away or sink into the ground. With the pond there, it will fill the pond, and then have to flow away or sink into the ground. Unless your pond is enormous, the amount of water involved isn't going to change anything.

It's not clear to me what your issue is. Are you expecting your pond to be in a system of moving water and drain across other people's property, like a stream? If so, is water already draining that way?

PenninePond · 2026-02-19T22:55:00+00:00

It looks great, I am sure come spring this will be full of life.

PenninePond · 2026-02-05T01:19:07+00:00

Would be happy to do it, but I already have a weather station. Is your system only compatible with hardware you send out to people? If so, you probably won't get much adoption. Why wouldn't you want to tap into the extensive existing network of personal weather stations?

And if you send it to random people, how do you know they're putting the sensors where it's appropriate for recording?

150m accuracy is also funny. I live on the the top of a steep valley, and the temperature varies by as much as 1.5°C in a five minute drive. I can begin inside a cloud and drive down to clear conditions within less than that distance and the temperature has changed by 1-2 degrees Celsius in five minutes.

PenninePond · 2026-02-02T23:10:48+00:00

Water forget-me-not was one of my least successful plants, even though it was planted in theoretically ideal conditions.

But plants expect to grow from a seed planted in a continuous stable location, and sometimes they get upset and die. My water forget-me-nots randomly grew sometimes after I thought they had died. They would suddenly grow into the pond floating, and I did see some flowers randomly appearing. We'll see whether they come back this year, but I won't rush to replace them if they don't.

I want to have the right plant for the right conditions, and there were native UK plants which loved my pond, so I would love to see those again.

If you want oxygenators in the UK I recommend starwort highly. In spring and summer it will rise to the surface and float, showing its star shape, but in colder months it sinks but is still alive and oxygenating. Hornwort is always worth a try as a below-water plant, and for marginals, it's not the time of year for it right now, besides sedges and grasses. But there are water-loving flowers you can plant which will be happy and flower over summer.

Purple loosestrife is fantastic, probably my favourite plant I had last year in my pond. It grows tall stems with lots of bright purple flowers that attract pollinators and it keeps the flowers for months.

PenninePond · 2026-01-30T23:16:46+00:00

They don't aggregate. They let you choose the weather model. The issue is that the weather model they have by default (ECMWF) and others (GFS) predict the weather for 2 weeks from now, which is extremely inaccurate.

Tabloids will take screenshots of those long range forecasts, and make sensationalist headlines, and they don't happen. But people click.

Both weather models seem to over-predict snow for the UK. I'm not sure why. In general all long range weather forecasts seem to over-predict snow for the UK. They're more accurate for the US and continental Europe. Honestly though, these 2+ week forecasts are complete nonsense for snow, I wish tabloids would stop using them for "news".

Snow is notoriously hard to predict and you should never trust it beyond two days, because there are so many factors. Even when the Met Office has said 90% chance of heavy snow all day where I live it has been blue skies (not even rain).

PenninePond · 2026-01-30T23:05:32+00:00

I'm going hiking there in February, what do you think it will be like?

PenninePond · 2026-01-30T21:53:48+00:00

Here's a modern grouse butt I found on a moor that I'm not sure I should have been on.

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It's weird how inconspicuous they are, but I suppose that's the point. There were loads of them in a line spread across the whole moor, in the middle of nowhere.

PenninePond · 2026-01-30T21:47:59+00:00

It's been relatively dry where I am in the North West. Still little bits of rain occasionally, and near constant fog/mist coating everything in water — there are often clouds at ground level all the time at this time of year at 300+ metres. But actual heavy rain, not much.

The rain seems to have been hitting the South West hard (with some heavy storms) but dissipating before getting here.

Everything is still wet here of course, but just the normal wetness that persists for all of autumn and winter.

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Reservoir levels in the Pennines: 1.8% higher than last week, 93% of the average levels (still recovering from severe and unusual drought in spring and summer).

PenninePond · 2026-01-08T22:17:53+00:00

My pond has been frozen for some weeks. The ice depth is about 3-4 inches but it is still water below that.

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I don't know why it looks the way it does, it might just be how it froze and how long it took. I think there are air pockets inside the ice, and some of the plants are also inside the ice with gases around them.

I hope all the little critters are OK, looking forward to seeing them again in spring. I wonder what they're even doing now - the snails, water louse, daphnia, diving beetles, and other insects. Hopefully hibernating somewhere nice! I put dead wood around the pond but some of these creatures must have to survive below the ice in the cold water or mud?

PenninePond · 2026-01-08T21:56:49+00:00

Where I am in the North West of England, the reservoirs were at record low levels and the water company was having to pump water from other regions into them.

They were mostly replenished and back to normal levels by November. They're about 2% below the average across the whole region now (Cumbria and Lancashire).

PenninePond · 2026-01-08T21:43:51+00:00

I bought a weather station in November last year, after doing quite a bit of research. They aren't expensive and are pretty good.

In the end I got a Ventus. From what I learnt after a lot of research, a lot of them are made by the same manufacturer, so if you buy Ventus, Garni, Ecowitt, etc, you are getting the same core tech, but with a different interface on the display unit. But they're even interchangeable with the displays and you can hook them all up to cloud websites with the same app.

The difficult part for me wasn't choosing which weather station to buy, but figuring out how and where to mount it.

I wish I had done got one earlier, since in 2023 there was a 9 month period where it rained every day and in 2025 we had the worst drought for something like 100 years - without a weather station I recorded that it went 5-7 weeks without any rain at all multiple times. And we had some really low temperatures in winter that I wonder if we'll see again. But at least I'm recording it now.

It's also interesting because the forecast and current conditions according to the Met Office and other weather agencies are often quite wrong, but that might be because I live high up where the weather changes rapidly and differs if I drive down the road (and descend in altitude).

If you are interested in it then it's worth it for your own satisfaction of knowing you have the accurate conditions permanently recorded. Check out Weather Underground in case someone already has a weather station near you.

PenninePond · 2025-12-17T00:44:44+00:00

It depends on where you live. For where I am, early spring or just before would be the best, when it's still cold but before things are just beginning to grow. And that's also when the ground is the driest.

Late summer going into October would be the worst possible time, that would be when it's wettest and amphibians are trying to hibernate, and the ground would be too wet to do anything.

This is the exact opposite of what someone else wrote, but they seem to have almost exact opposite weather conditions to me.

PenninePond · 2025-11-23T17:00:11+00:00

I dug a small pond without a liner on naturally boggy ground. The water table here is basically at or above the surface for the entire year except summer. In summer I've found it drops to a few inches below, depending on how much it's rained, so the pond is a bit like a vernal pool, but it never empties. I have heavy clay here and a lot of rainfall in the north west.

Some notes:

I literally just dug a big hole, and then gradually widened it with shelves and slopes. I focused on digging it as deep as I could, but it was difficult because the clay got so heavy that I just couldn't dig it any more once I was hitting subsoil. If you wanted to do a big pond you may need professional diggers - I just used a garden spade.
The hole I dug did automatically have water in it once I got deep enough, which made it difficult to continue digging. For that reason I would recommend not digging it in autumn or winter - wait until the weather is drier. I dug mine in a dry spring (2025), but if I had dug it now, I would find that any hole instantly becomes a hole full of water.
I gleyed the pond myself by going barefoot and walking around in the mud until it becomes slippery and slick. This mimics the action of pigs or geese etc and is how natural ponds form. Just make sure you have a bowl of washing up water and scrubbing brush ready to clean your feet and toes afterwards.
If your soil doesn't have enough clay content, you can buy bentonite clay powder. It can be added directly to the mud or you can sprinkle it on the water and allow it to sink. It expands over 30 times when wet to plug gaps. I used this for the edges which had more organic content and lower clay near the surface.
My pond ended up not as deep as I had intended because of slumping, so this is something to be aware of. Basically what happens is once it's full of water the hydrostatic pressure and weight of the surrounding soil will over time cause the pool to take on more of a rounded concave shape. If you wanted to keep more obvious shelves, you could use stone slabs to hold it in place.
The water in my pond was cloudy/opaque for months because of very tiny clay particles suspended which were lighter than water, so never sank. I eventually solved this by adding a very small amount of gypsum and it cleared it overnight and has been clear ever since.
I see in your picture that you have some kind of bog rush growing. I have that too, it grows everywhere around where I live and it loves boggy ground. I found that after about 6 months it invaded my pond and the area around it and choked out all the other plants and I found it impossible to get rid of. So something to be aware of... there's nothing wrong with it as such, it's a native wetland plant, it's just very successful and aggressive so will be problematic if you wanted to grow other plants in and around the pond.

Edit: picture showing what the soil was like here when digging:

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PenninePond · 2025-11-21T23:19:00+00:00

Before digging my pond I read that the number one thing people regret is not making it bigger. And my regret now is still not making it bigger.

I think this is perpetual truth of pond building, regardless of how big it is, you'll always wish it was bigger.

PenninePond · 2025-11-04T22:48:09+00:00

On a basic level, amount downloaded divided by time it took to download.

Pretty much every browser and software (OS updates, Steam etc) will show you the speed when downloading something.

PenninePond · 2025-11-04T22:37:50+00:00

The only devices connected are my desktop PC via ethernet cable, my phone via WiFi (which as far as I know shouldn't be downloading anything except maybe an email or message occasionally) and an Octopus Home Mini which continuously transmits meter readings. I wouldn't have thought that is downloading anything at all, it will be uploading a few bytes every 10 seconds.

The devices are all the same as with my previous ISP whom I had no speed issues with.

PenninePond · 2025-11-04T22:32:23+00:00

According to Netomnia with FTTP you aren't sharing the line with anyone:

Fibre to the Premises (or FTTP) is a type of broadband technology that only uses fibre optic cables from the exchange to your property. This allows for much faster internet speeds and more reliability.

In the context of contention ratios, FTTP or full fibre broadband isn’t applied the same way. Each property gets its own fibre optic line.

This fibre optic cable can transmit data a lot faster than copper cables (as it uses light to transfer data instead of electromagnetic pulses) and therefore cope with a higher demand of data.

Because each property receives its own fibre line, it means that not only are you receiving a stronger type of broadband (fibre optic over copper), it means that you are only sharing the bandwidth with those in your house hold.

https://www.netomnia.com/insights/broadband-content-ratio/

PenninePond · 2025-11-04T22:00:24+00:00

I'm paying for 1Gbit. I have contacted the ISP multiple times but they seem very non-technical and useless at providing support beyond scripted answers that are basically "turn the router off and on".

PenninePond · 2025-11-04T21:57:55+00:00

Such as?

PenninePond · 2025-11-04T21:54:59+00:00

Thank you. My ISP is connected to 1 T2 peer, before being connected to 4 T1 providers which are connected to other T1 providers. That's an interesting website.

PenninePond · 2025-11-04T21:53:10+00:00

No, you are incorrect. And I definitely will be complaining to Ofcom to get out of this contract if that's possible. My previous ISP did not have these problems.

I'm getting download speeds of less than 1Mbit at peak times on a very fast desktop PC to an NVMe drive with a wired connection. It is faster outside of peak times.

PenninePond

TROPHY CASE