Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations The joy and sorrow of autumn

My wife and I enjoyed living in the south for many years, but we're both happy to be back in the north country where we belong. We're even happier that last winter we bought a property with a decidedly rural character despite being only a half hour away from Albany, NY where my wife works. It even has a couple of good-sized ponds (2.2 ac manmade near the house, 2.4 ac natural beyond that) and a marsh (beyond the natural pond) for me to play in during my semi-retirement! :^] The surrounding mixed forest is especially lovely at this time of year, too, with the leaves turning their many different colors.

There's of course a downside to that last, as well, and that's what I'm hoping someone here might be able to help with.

See, we want to manage the manmade pond first and foremost for swimming and aesthetic beauty. (All we currently plan to do for the natural pond is eliminate invasive exotic vegetation to the best of our ability.) Its water is exceptionally clear for this area, with around 10 ft visibility most of the time (that’s why we bought the place! :^] ), and we really want to keep it that way. A free-floating algae bloom knocked visibility down substantially for a little while this summer and warned us that we can't just leave the pond's management to our good wishes. I'm looking into aerating it to shift nutrient consumption as best I can from algae to aquatic plants and to try to deal with its muck build-up without dredging (check out my thread at http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=458035#Post458035 ), but I'd also really like to reduce the amount of nutrients reaching the pond from the surrounding landscape.

All that surrounding forest drops an incredible amount of leaves and pine needles, don't you know. And a dismaying amount of what's dropped ends up in the pond despite my best efforts to keep it out.

So I'm wondering, has anyone come across or come up with any way to deal with large amounts of leaves and pine needles that fall or blow into a good-sized pond? (Short of removing the trees or trying to fence or otherwise screen off the pond, I mean.) I love and can probably afford automation but I'm not afraid to spend a meaningful portion of my semi-retirement in manual labor, if that's what it takes; it's just that there's so much water to cover and so much material falling into it that I simply can't accomplish enough by paddling about in my little boat and scooping the leaves and pine needles up with my hand net.

Anyone? Any way?...

(Hope, hope, hope...)

Gerry

Gerry:

There are a few things you can do.

1) Put a 24" tall temporary fence around the pond in the fall to catch the leaves.

2) Buy a 3-point PTO driven blower for your tractor to blow all the leaves back into the woods when they land on the grass.

3) Use muck digesting pellets once you have the aeration system in.

Suggested that to my wife right off, as soon as I recognized the issue. She emphasized that putting up any such screen would ruin the aesthetics of the pond (which is very visible from the house, and on the shore of which we spend a fair amount of time) for her, especially putting it up during the year's most beautiful season. See my response to #2 below, besides.


Bought a powerful backpack blower instead, as there are areas I can't really get to with our tractor. And I use said blower assiduously. Lots of stuff still manages to blow into the pond, though, and lots of stuff drops in directly as well.


Yup, I'm planning on that, too. :^/ Yet another reason why I'm working on the aeration issue.

I appreciate your reply esshup, please don't think that I don't. But I guess what I'm really wondering is, does anyone have any ideas on how to skim the pond's surface more effectively than me working from my small boat with a hand net? Seems to me there's a window of opportunity to get those leaves and pine needles once they've fallen into the water but before they sink to the bottom, but there's just too much water to cover and too much material to pick up using the aforementioned approach.

Gerry

Go buy these: parachute skimmer Tie as many side by side as your back can handle. Use a long rope and cover as much of the pond surface as you can. When you remove the leaves from the pond, bring them to an area where they can decompose and not wash any of the nutrients back into the pond.

Hmmm, their pond version is 5 ft wide - not so big that I couldn't pull it behind my little boat, but big enough to make a difference... I'm going to seriously consider it. Thanks, esshup!

Anyone else come across or come up with any other possible solutions?

Gerry

search with google using pondboss forum and 'prickly rope' There was a thread about adding 'pricklies' to a rope to help grab floating leaves. There were several ideas, all good, and that idea I think still could be improved on if the pricklies were more stiff to snag the leaves. It isn't as good for partially submerged leaves or algae and anything stiff/stringy like algae is going to push through the prickles unless they are more stiff.

I was thinking of ways to make those fingers coming off the rope more stiff.

If you had a power boat, probably a canvas, or plastic dropcloth or tarp with enough 2" holes to let water through would catch sticks, leaves and big mats of algae when pulled like a parachute through the water.

Someday i was thinking of adding a little motor to a stable fiberglass boat hull say an old trihull runabout (the ones given away on CL all the time that can draft about 5 or 6" of water) and then rig up a snowplow up front or a V shaped boom made of PVC with some PVC mesh like comes on rolls used for building fish traps and then just do lanes back and forth 'plowing' leaves. My teen-ager would love to idle around the pond a few times every day or two plowing leaves up on shore. Well, he actually wouldn't ever idle but rather would be going full speed trying to create a big wake... but that is another story.

Prickly rope? Wow, canyon, interesting idea! But wouldn't it be a pain in the you-know-what to clean the rope between uses? I guess I should look into that old thread.

Gerry

Not my idea, i can't take credit, but I did try it myself and found my cable ties not stiff enough. The ideal thing about using braided poly rope (rather than a smooth paracord or some other smooth rope) is that you have 3 strands that easily separate in the rope. You can then poke the cable tie quickly in between the strands of rope, tighten and leave the end long. Then the cable tie doesn't spin around on the rope and keeps its orientation and you can have the prickles sticking out in all directions.

Check this and there might be another thread on that:

prickly rope

gbin -

Handling the leaves and needles _before_ they enter the pond will be the least labor intensive and the most economical and feasible. There are always trade offs, and here is no exception. Do you really want to skim a 2 acre pond on a daily basis for 1-2 months? Do you want to dredge up the fallen needles and leaves each year, which by them may include valuable life such as damsel/dragon fly larvae, crawfish, etc.?

I understand the aesthetic concern, but a fence would be for 1-2 months, a fence is proactive, and a fence would allow you to spend your "free time" doing other things.

Other options? Chop the trees ... Stand beneath them and use a blower to blow the leaves off prematurely and keep them from the pond ... take a professional landscape portrait of the pond area and have it printed and scaled so that the misses _thinks_ she's look out upon the pond but in fact is looking at a printed scene ...

I appreciate where you're coming from, blover, but we bought this property as much for the trees as for the ponds, and I prioritize the happiness of our marriage more than anything else in my life. I accommodate her on some things even if they seem unreasonable to me, and she does the same for me. After nearly 3 decades together I'd have to say that it works for us. :^/

Gerry

If I remember tomorrow, I'll take a picture of the leaf blower that I used today to blow leaves away from ponds and into the woods.

I have to ask.. What's so bad about getting leaves in the pond? Mine gets millions of leaves dumped in it every fall. Walking around in the pond, with my bare feet on the bottom, I'm not finding that much muck built up. My pond is only two years old, and I am planning on adding aeration next summer, but I still ask, what's so bad about getting leaves in the pond? Wooded lakes and ponds have been getting leaves in them forever. I think they are still healthy. Now I have to worry about this.. Not really..

We don't think there's anything so bad about getting a bunch of leaves in a pond in general, Setter; it's just bad for the way we want to manage this particular pond. It was dug around 30 years ago and has laid down more than a bit of muck in that time. I think the muck has taken away about a quarter of the pond's original depth (some 5 ft out of what we were told was originally 20 ft), in fact, and more importantly to us it makes wading unpleasant. And although the water is usually exceptionally clear (around 10 ft!), in the one summer that we've owned the property we did experience one very murky floating algae bloom, which makes swimming unpleasant even if one is careful getting in and out so as not to disturb the muck any more than necessary. Swimming is our main interest in the pond, so we accordingly want to minimize the nutrients that result in the muck and floating algae getting into the pond, and leaves and pine needles look to be the #1 way that nutrients are entering.

We also have a natural pond that we're fine with having muck and murky water in, whatever nature wants to do with it. (Except for the invasive exotic plants trying to creep in; those we've targeted for elimination.)

Gerry

Thanks Gerry. We primarily swim in our pond also. I can imagine 30 years of accumulated leaves really creating a lot of muck.
We do not have 10' clarity, closer to 2'. It keeps plants from taking over. (I believe)
As long as my wife is comfortable swimming, I'm happy.
Good luck with your aeration project. I'll be following along to see how it goes.
Thanks,
Jeff

And I reckon to a good extent you're right, Jeff.

Back when I lived in northcentral FL it was really apparent to me: Among the many small, shallow lakes and ponds there, there were some with clear water, clean bottoms and lots and lots of plants, and there were some with murky water, muddy bottoms and few or no aquatic plants. Whatever nutrients get in the water have to go somewhere, and folks who introduced carp at some point in the past to handle their aquatic weed problem shifted their water bodies from the former condition to the latter. It all depends on what you want.


You're even more right about this. When I said above that "it all depends on what you want," what I really meant is that it all depends on what your wife wants. To any as yet unmarried or newly married guys out there, I can tell you that old saying is definitely true: Happy wife = happy life. :^/

In my case, unfortunately, my wife grew up swimming in the Adirondacks' Lake George, which is very large and deep, and still quite oligotrophic. In other words, nice sandy/rocky bottom, not very many plants and unbelievably clear water - I'm talking over 40 ft visibility (and it was perceptibly clearer when she was young). At every place we looked at with a pond last summer/fall when we were searching for a new home, I kept reminding her "Now, bear in mind that Lake George set an impossible standard for you. Scale down your expectations on the pond(s) here..." When we saw this place and its pond with remarkably clear water for the area, it was the first place where she said "I would swim here." When it turned out to be the only place where she said that in the great many we looked at, and thinking about the fact that swimming is one of her all-time favorite activities (and watching her swim and sunbathe afterward is one of mine :^] ), I said "Let's buy it!"

Gerry

The other thing to think about is an aluminum sulfate treatment to reduce the amount of available phosphorous. Check the muddy water threads to see how that is done, and research how alum binds P.