Common Carder

My day began well, with a productive invertebrate hunt while the morning was still cool after overnight frost. Then things went badly awry, when I decided to tidy up the little free-standing container pond on the patio, and discovered that it was absolutely choked with a thick mat of what I'm pretty sure was crassula. It certainly looked like the plant that's been taking over the big pond at Trench Wood for several years now, and which a Worcestershire Wildlife Trust employee told me last year was due to be tackled over the winter. I haven't yet made my first trip of the season to Trench, but I hope the Trust was able to carry out its plan to cover the pond with black plastic to kill this invasive weed. As to how it got into my own pond - who knows? It's been illegal to sell the stuff in the UK for a decade now, but eradicating it is virtually impossible, and it transfers with frightening ease from one place to another. I may even have brought some back unwittingly on my clothing, from either Trench Wood or the Cleeve Prior Community Orchard, where it's busily working on turning the smallest pond into a flower bed.

If you seek advice from pond forums and mention the word crassula, you'll likely be told that the best thing you can do is fill in your pond, cover it over with concrete, and dig a new one somewhere else. What I did was to lift the entire weed mat out of the pond in sections, then skim the water with a fine sieve to try to get out as much free-floating plant debris as I could. The pond holds 50 gallons of water, and is only about a metre in diameter; the crassula mat filled a wheelbarrow, and when it was gone, I was left with muddy water, and virtually nothing else. There were no insects, no larvae, and just one rather sad snail. Only one of the seven plants I started with back in 2020 still appeared to have some life left in it, and I can't even remember what that one is - possibly Water Fringe, because it was set quite deep in the water - but I rinsed it off as well as I could and put it back, so with luck in time I'll find out.

Then, after phoning around pond suppliers in the area to find out who had some plants in stock, I took a trip to Maidenhead Aquatics near Stratford. The manager had warned me on the phone that their stock was currently quite poor, and he wasn't lying, but I came back with a few things, and I'll probably go back for more tomorrow, when they're expecting a plant delivery to arrive. For now I've done what I can to start the process of repairing the damage, and re-establishing what used to be a very successful little pond. Needless to say, I'm also on high alert for any signs of the monster weed invading our wildlife pond, but crassula can't survive in the dark, and I hope that the thick carpet of leaves that covered this pond through the winter may have served the same purpose as the black polythene used by conservation organisations, and killed the stuff at birth.

It didn't occur to me at the time to photograph the weed mat I was removing from the pond, but even if it had I'd probably have been too grumpy to post the image. Here instead is a beautiful Common Carder Bee (Bombus pascuorum), feeding from the deep pink blossom of the small crab apple tree in our yard. I love this little tree, and I love Common Carders, so this is a double helping of therapy. 

And - breathe.....