I got some stick from my sister for my last blog - “not convinced by your schoolboy excitement over matters sexual” - but this one too is a bit dirty I’m afraid. But, you’ll be relieved to know, not in that way. So in an effort to redeem myself let me tell you about Adam the Aquarius.
Here he is:
And here’s what he does: anything to do with ponds. We found him via the classified ads in the RHS Garden magazine as we were looking for someone to advise us on how to clean up our very murky pond water. As my regular readers will know, we’d tried various remedies to no avail so the expensive solution - a filtration unit - was the only remaining option. We were advised by Adam’s boss that a pair of Hozelock Bioforce Revolution 14000 units would do the trick for a pond of our size, so last week Adam arrived to install them.
But first he had to empty the pond, all 6000 gallons, remove the fish, all 269 of them, clean out the silt, about three wheelbarrow loads, trim the lilies (‘How do you know they’re lilies? Because Lily’s wearing them.’ L. Donegan, 1960.), and power-wash the pond lining. Here’s proof of Adam’s dirty doings:
That took him a couple of days. After which he had to install the filtration units: this meant digging holes to part-bury them and gouge trenches to take the cables and hoses to and fro the pumps in the pond. Half a day later he was able to give me the go-ahead to refill the pond, partly using the mains water supply (expensive as we’re metered) but mainly using water from our own well. The only snag with the well-water was that it kept running dry - the water levels of the local aquifers are so low because of GLOBAL WARMING MR TRUMP - so I had to adopt a routine of filling for half an hour then allowing two hours to top up the well before I could sneak another half hour’s worth for the pond. Still, in the end there was enough water for the fish to be re-located and the lilies reinstated. Here are pictures of Adam’s cleaner doings:
And here are pictures of the pond, before and after. Still looks murky to me but Adam assures me that patience is the thing…and trust that it’ll be clean in the end. Just like this blog.
