an anyone advise me on how to turn a small pond into a bog garden please?

[GrimmaTheNome]

We have a very small pond in the corner of our garden. Unfortunately it has been attracting rats to drink from it over the summer so DH has deemed that it has to go The obvious solution is to turn it into a bog garden - that end of the garden is quite boggy anyway so it will fit in. I'll probably put in irises and candelabra primulas - any ideas for plants that flower before and after those would be appreciated.

So, presumably puncture the liner and fill, but with what exactly? Gravel at the bottom maybe? And do I have to clear out whatever sludge is at the bottom or can that stay? And also, I feel bad about the idea of just dumping stuff straight on the snails (ramshorns and the common water snails) - and whatever else may live in there (we had a couple of frogs earlier in the year, don't know if they are still there). Any ideas how to do this habitat destruction in as benign way as possible?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Anyone?

Could you contact a local wildlife centre, to see if they would regime the snails?

Apart from that, I think you're right to pierce the liner and fill with topsoil. I'm not sure about gravel (unless the pond is very deep) as the point of a bog garden us that you don't want quick drainage.

Err. Rehome the snails. Drat the autocorrect.

If it was newts, I'm sure they'd be interested but I can't quite see someone coming to fish out snails (mostly the common sort, they arrived without our intervention)

Well, in that case, fill a bucket and take them to the nearest park with a pond?

Wonder if they'd live in a canal (its a nice rural one with fish etc). I don't have anything non-native in the pond. But how to get snails into bucket (some are tiny, that's why it feels so very mean to dump soil on them.)

Humph... I'm not this sentimental about slugs!

Thanks Mad

Maud. I don't have autocorrect, just a sticky keyboard!

not sure what the rats have to do with it .... they will be in your garden for reasons other than the pond

They were also there for the bird food and compost bin, but the water was definitely attracting them - they'd be at the pond drinking in broad daylight. The dog is innoculated against Weil's disease but people aren't.

Got to see about rat-proof compost bins and some way of feeding the birds too (I hate not having the seed feeders up and don't like binning the veg waste - council doesn't collect it)

It sounds like a really nice idea. Sadly I have no idea how to help...our entire garden becomes a bog around this time of year.

Oh I am Ok on rats though...we have them, but we had them long before our chickens - they liked next door's compost pile which is about the size of a small country.

So if you can resolve the compost issue you might be Ok.

Strangely I have not seen a rat for some months, not in the chicken run anyway - not since a very large one appeared to ingest all the poison from the box at once, and died dramatically on the floor next to it.

We've already punctured the liner. Drat..we had loads of moss in the lawn, DH treated it a couple of weeks ago and I'm not sure if the treatment will have washed off the dead stuff, not sure if it'd be a good idea to use it.

I was suprised not to find many water-snail shells in the bottom among the sludge, maybe they have some ability to travel overland.