Making a Garden Water Feature - Waterwheel

This is a project that had its origins over six years ago, but I've only just completed it !  Therefore some of the first descriptions of cleaning the pump and building up a waterwheel date back to a draft post from 2013 which was never published.

My wife has always wanted a water feature in the the garden.  When we did the major landscaping works in 2013 we put a couple of old round resin sinks into the planted gravel area to be used as sumps, and although I've played around with a few ideas over the years these sumps are just too small to be effective for water features and fountains - they're very shallow and tend to empty quickly due to water loss from splashing and also the wind carrying the water outside the bowl area.

the two sumps installed in position many moons ago....

Two Islands ...

A somewhat belated post, from our now regular trips to the sun during the first few months of the year, to escape the cold and miserable weather of north-east England.

This year, we split our time away across two islands, with a three-week gap at home between.  One of the reasons for this was that last year we returned home from an extended break only to find we hadn't actually missed the worst of the cold weather, which was still to come in mid March.

So this year, we went first to Fuerteventura and then made another trip to Tenerife.

Feurteventura was quite cool at the start of the year, although there were several days of warm weather during the trip.  There were also strong north-easterly winds blowing continuously, which is supposedly one of the reasons for the name of the island.