Have small children clamouring for goldfish and pathological hatred of cleaning out fishtanks…

will dig big hole.

Having drawn some interesting but perhaps not shareable conclusions about our domestic soil profile, we added the preformed liner donated by the in-laws (also pestered by said small children. Someone give them something to do – four of the six weeks of summer holidays have been survived but we’re getting desperate.)

In a very clever way (mainly because we looked it up on the internet first) we made the hole about 2″ deeper than the pond to allow for a layer of sand at the bottom. This was a blessing – the base of the Big Hole was like a particularly stony brand of concrete (see reference to soil profile above) so there was no way we were going to get this baby level without introducing some leeway.

Half-filled to stabilise it and it’s looking good – the water is even lining up with those ledge things quite nicely so I guess that means The Bloke can use a spirit level after all. Actually he did most of this, but since he had his shirt off at the time I’m reserving the evidence for my eyes only. We did line up a lot of wheelbarrows (very small ones for the little people) and move dirt. And I got down in the hole with my girlie border spade and shovelled out the bottom bits (to much praise over my digging technique from mud-phobic husband: you see there was a reason for all that gardening, after all).