Better Late than Never

Better Late than Never

Ok slightly long post

I was going to post this just before the site went down, so let me begin.

We have a small pond in the garden, it’s a curved triangular shape (see sketch) only about 4ft (1200mm) at its widest/longish part. After reading about how people were beginning to see frogs in early February, I thought I’ll keep an eye out, so every night whilst letting the dog out I checked the pond even with a torch for signs of frog activity. No Nah nada zilch not a sign of our little friends this went on until mid march

So thinking that the bad weather had killed them (previous year had only seen 6 frogs in the pond) and this was going to be a blank year for frogs. I then decided to remove the reeds that were overtaking the pond (see sketch)

Right lets pull a few out at a time, but no they all moved as one, and were too heavy to lift out in one lump, off to get the secateurs, but the roots were so tightly interwoven that it was extremely hard going, ok off to get a pad saw!! Ha haa now we’re cooking. After a short time I found the original pot that the reeds came in, totally enclosed in roots

Getting on to about half way through the mass of roots

(Bear in mind this mass of roots was about 15”/18” cubed!!) Out of the corner of my eye I noticed some movement underneath the roots I was about to cut into, so started pulling the roots apart, low and behold a frog how it got in to almost the centre of the root ball I’ll never know?

After that I went a bit more slowly just in case, just as well found another 2 frogs nearer the top. Glad to say a couple of weeks after the removal of the reeds, we had frogspawn

Which has now hatched, then just on 18/4/11 had some more frogspawn which seems quite late.