Nightingale Community Garden

An update from the pond team about the sump, a deeper area of the pond intended as a refuge of last resort for wildlife. The text on this image is reproduced below.

The sump is kidney-shaped, with vegetation occupying one-third of the area. The plan is to have open water in the other two-thirds, but it will take a few years to clear out the mud. This year Rob and Anne removed the mud from the edge, leaving quite a lot of mud in the middle. Rob measured the width of the sump as 1.7m in the "open water@ part, 1.9m in the vegetated part.

Four plants in flower in the pond enclosure

Above left [a tall plant with dark red stems, long thin leaves, clusters of delicate pink flowers]: Hemp agrimony growing in front of the willow at the top of the bank

Above middle [a dense collection of mint plants in flower]: Water mint in the sump.

Above right [a plant with rounded leaves]: Mystery plant on the edge of the sump. It has reddish, woody stems and blue flowers. Maybe Gill can identify it.

Left [close-up picture of various plants, looking healthy and vibrant despite the drought]: There is a stem of the mystery plant in the top left corner. The arched stem below it is gypsywort. The flowers of gypsywort are tiny but very pretty. The leaves are in pairs, each of which has a ring of white flowers at its base.

Notes on the planned annual work to clean out the sump can be found here: cleaning-out-sump.pdf

An update from Anne and Anna about the pond. The text on this image is reproduced below for screen readers

Text:

We are in the middle of a long summer drought and our pond has dried up — though we still have water in a very deep area that we call the sump. Realistically we can't expect significant amounts of rain until September at the earliest. The pond will recover swiftly as soon as the autumn rains begin.

In the meantime it's a golden opportunity to clear surplus vegatation from the pond and to find out exactly how deep the pond is. The pond bottom has a more complex shape than we realised! We need to make a contour map so that we can move around the pond safely when it fills up this autumn.

Our last serious drought was in 2022. There wasn't a hosepipe ban that summer and the gardening team used mains water to keep the pond full. Attitudes have changed since then, and we decided not to use mains water at all this summer. That's why the pond has dried out this year.