On a sunny Monday morning, Balal, John, Miriam and Ryan went to Oasis Foundry Academy to get started on digging a pond for the school. We were met by Megan from the school and Jake from the Wildlife Trust, who talked us through what we were going to do and gave us the tools for the job before we got cracking.

We were digging the hole entirely from scratch so after Jake had measured out the area, we got started by removing the turf - hence today's pun. Ryan told us that he grew up on a farm so he was by far the most effective, putting us city slickers to shame! But Jake was very helpful and gave us some really useful tips to remove the turf.

Once the turf was removed, Jake roughly outlined the shape of the pond and we started to remove the soil. This proved to be quite difficult as the land was previously built upon so there were a lot of bricks and stones in the soil. Fortunately Jake had a chisel digging bar which somewhat helped to soften the earth and remove some of the bricks.

Before we knew it, it was 12:00 and time to go home, but Miriam and Ryan were kind enough to stay behind and help further, removing as much soil as possible before our next visit on Thursday, when we hope to finish the job!