Hi,

We are new to your site. We bought an old farm in south-central Pennsylvania a few years ago. It was kind of a general purpose farm, with cattle, hogs, and many other animals and gardens.

It has several ponds, and what appear to be older ponds that have been completely overgrown.

This past springtime, we brought in a contractor to rework the pond we see from the kitchen windows and back porch of the old house. It was rather small, maybe 75 x 75 feet. It had mostly filled in with cattails and muck. It was only 3-4 feet deep. It had some fish in it, but we don't know what kind they were.

It is just below an old barn. The contractor drained the pond as best as he could, but it is fed with several springs in other parts of the pasture. He took out the cattails and muck from the old pond, and moved them to a lower pasture with a dumptruck. He then elongated the pond, to where it is now about about 250 feet long. We wish he would have made it deeper, but he had several concerns about doing so. It is maybe nine to ten feet at the deepest, but it has steep banks going into the water. He said he did that to keep the cattails from coming back.

The pond quickly filled up this spring when he finished. The water was very muddy, and it has stayed very muddy. Starting in about July, it was covered with what looked like floating green cow manure, which then turned brown. It then really looked like cow manure.

There are still some kind of fish living in it, but they are too small to catch. We'd like to clear the mud. We would also like to start adding fish to it.

We would like to start with trout.

We need suggestions for the muddy water, the floating manure, and where to get fish to stock the pond.