The sky today looks much the same as it did yesterday, but today it rains a lot. At least now in the early morning.

It rains and it rains a lot now! Neither I nor my dogs wants to take a walk in this weather but we have all day to take our walks so there´s no hurry. But it´s almost two hundred meters to my mailbox so I haven´t read my morning paper yet. I´ll listening to the radio instead. During summers I only listens to the county radio. The commercial stations just plays the same popsongs all the time and having already heard the commercials over and over again makes me a bit tired of them. Our county radio, Radio Skaraborg, is non commercial and it´s all about just our county and what happens here. I listens to it often otherwise too, but mostly in summers.





They can play pop hits for the day too, but mostly it´s a bigger variation on the music. It can be anything from old stone cakes (do You call them that too? the old records that we played in 78 speed?) to jaz, blues and anything else. They also plays popsongs from countries we seldom here music from, like the countries in Asia (not often, but it happens). They also have little games when listeners can compete against each other. But one of my favourite shows during summers is "The daily summer host". It can be a star or a total stranger that gets one hour to talk and play their favourite music. Today it´s a soccer referee I´ve never heard of before. We have a similar show on one of the channels at this radio company too ((Swedish Radio) that program is called "Summer talker") and that is also commercial free. Then it´s almost only famous people that gets almost two hours to talk and play music. To be honoured to talk in that program is as close one can get to be knighted here in Sweden :-)

The natural little ponds we passes on our daily walks never got totally dried out, so perhaps we still going to have some dragonflies here. Isn´t it strange that there always is at least one old tire in the pond? Must have been one of us in the village throwing it there once upon a time.

A night butterfly. But I think they are called moths in english. Moths for us is those that destroyes our clothes and we have to use mothballs to get rid of.

Another one. This one is really missplaced here. It should ofcourse be on a birch tree, there it would be totally invisible, here it sort of screams that it wants to be eaten :-)

I decided to start with the pond yesterday. The sky only spitted out som drops of rain now and again (in other places it rained so much that cellars got filled with water and traffic had to stopp for a long time) so I took the chance to level the edge and put out the carpets. The problem was that all heavy thundershowers hade made the soil and sand to run down to the bottom of my hole and evened the different levels in the pond. So first I had to re dig som parts of the hole. Another problem was that a whole lot of stones had come up to the surface and that´s no good. They can, even with the protection carpet on, damage the rubber carpet. So I had to pick a lot of small stones before also.

The protection carpet is on place. The white color seemes to call for all horseflies in the village to come and visit. It was a nightmare to put it out over the pond.

The protection carpet was easy to put in place. But it sort of called every single horse fly to join me when working. It was a nightmare to try to kill every flie at the same time I tried to lay out the carpet :-) So I was very quick to pull out the rubber carpet and place it over the whtie one. Most of the horse flies then dissapered :-)

So I was very quick to place the rubber carpet over it and most of the horseflies flew away. In all books I´ve read it says :"Be sure not to fold the pond carpet, because it will easily get damaged then". How drunk were they when they wrote that down? It´s totally impossible not to fold if in any way!!! Perhaps they laughed till tears came, seeing in their minds how people trying not to fold it? :-)

In all books I´ve read it says: " Be sure not to fold the carpet because it´ll easily be damaged then". Yeah! Sure! How? I think every one that wrote this must have been totally drunk or perhaps totally evil :-) It´s impossible to not fold it! So I got the brilliant idea to fill the pond with water, then the weight of the water should help me to strech the rubber carpet to avoid folding as much as possible. As You all know brilliance only has a thin line to insanity. I was on the wrong side of that yesterday :-)

So I folded it as good as I could and started to fill it with water.

With water in it, it was impossible to do anything :-) So I started to fold the rubber carpet so there was as few foldings as possible instead. The water was cold, it´s usually that if it comes from a deep drilled well :-) No problems though, after a while one can´t feel the feets anyway, not even if one hits it on the door on the way inside either. Not then at least, the pain comes later :-)

I hoped that You would be able to see the rain in the water here, but it doesn´t show especially good. I still have a lot to do with my pond, but I´m getting there :-)

Now the pond is almost filled to the top, the rain has helped with that all night. Now I have to dig down the rest of the rubbercarpet so it woun´t show to much. I was thinking of making some wetbeds. I can´t find the right english word for that, but a wet bed is done so thet the bottom of it always is wet. It can be maid with a bucket or as I will do with rubber carpet. One can say that i´s made like a pond. The water in the bottom must never get a chance to get away. I fill the wet bed wit soil and then water on that. Then I fill some more soil and more water until I reach the top of the rubber carpet. That water will now stay there. Then I put even more soil over all that and then plants what ever plants I want to have there. The top soil will mostly be very dry, but the roots will go down to the wet soil in the wet bed. By doing like this I can have plants that wants it reallly dry and the opposit too. They can get that much water they wants to. A wet bed only has to be watered in very dry periods. Our rainy autumns/winters/ springs will do it the rest of the time :-)

Well it looks like there´s less rain now, so perhaps I´ll get my morning paper.

Have a great day now!