I'm delighted to welcome a guest writer to the team, someone whose wise words you might read in the nature notes section of The Guardian - Derek Niemann. He and his wife Sarah have a tiny garden partially shaded by a Sycamore tree from next door. It's a mixed blessing in autumn, as Derek reports:The heaviest showers this autumn came, not from the skies, but from that blessed Sycamore tree, whose giant leaves rained down on our garden over a mercifully short two-week period. Once the wind had flicked the last one off, it was time to act.Frankly, those that fall into the flowerbeds can stay there. They'll provide a thin blanket for the soil and they'll break down harmlessly there, releasing nutrients back from whence they came. I'll gather most of those that fall on the grass. In a well-punctured bag, they'll rot down over the next eighteen months and make good compost. Those that are left are "the worm's share", to be tugged underground on mild nights. Sycamore leaves are tough, leathery old things, so the worm’s midnight feast is a chewy one.The pond is a different matter. It's a wind's breath away from the tree and it swallows a huge number of leaves. It's helpful to get most of them out because such a bulk of decomposing material next spring would deprive the pond of oxygen. Call me a masochist, but I prefer to dip down with bare arms to haul them out, rather than use a rake. It's largely because I shake off the wild passengers before the leaves end up in a compost pile. And what passengers! Virtually every leaf had a pond snail or three (right). Some had a water louse, and, remarkably, a fair number had a torpid damselfly larva clinging on. Most of them proved unshakably obdurate, so I dropped them back into the water. Perhaps I’ll see them in their adult brilliance a few months from now.
We bought a few pond snails 2 or 3 years ago from a garden centre. The staff were amazed at how many empty shells they had, and we bought the sole surviving 3 or 5.
Over the years I have not seen them, until we were cleaning the pond (only a bit) and 1 or 2 of them have now grown big!
I also found a newt outside our kitchen patio door one evening last autumn. The pond is close by, so we put it on the shelf beside the pond, and I hope it returned to it.
We do not get frog spawn, but we do have over 30 fish, from a stock of only 3 that we bought with us 3 years ago when we moved.
When will this year warm up! Nothing wants to grow in my pond or garden!
Jay Bird
You are so lucky to find snails still in your pond. Over the years we have bought snails for our small pond but none of them seem to survive. We found some dragonfly larvae one year so assumed they had eaten them but apart from that don't know what is happening to them. All the other pond life seems very healthy.
I am lucky enough to have room for a reasonably large pond and leave the majority of the leaves in the pond.
To begin with I used to religiously pick all the leaves out, and like yourself, I’d carefully pick any creatures off the leaves and return them to the pond. It always amazed me at how quickly the leaves would collect pond life; this led me on to thinking that of all the plant life in the pond these creatures preferred leaves so they had to be a preferred food source.
As long as the pond does not gather enough leaves to cause a problem I’m happy for them to stay and feed what ever is in the pond.