Help w/ more FA - Spring fed pond! - 04/11/13 06:13 PM
We redug a 1/2 acre pond two summers ago after having broken the dam 8 or so years ago before that. We put in an aeration system running 24x7 in Mar ‘12 and then stocked the pond in May ‘12 with FHMs, golden shiners, BG, redear sunfish and CC. In the fall, we stocked LMB.
I fought FA all summer long last year and eventually cleared the pond of the floating mats by the end of the fall using an aquatic rake – good workouts. Well, the FA is back with a vengeance. I have been reluctant to use chemicals in large part, because our pond is spring fed (about a gallon every 2-3 seconds) from the uninhabited property next to ours. I have felt that any chemical we add will be too quickly diluted with inflow of fresh water from the spring.
I take recordings each month and typically measure pH at 7.45 using a pH meter and Alkalinity and Hardness of 720 and 300 respectively, using test strips. Both the last 2 numbers seem very high to me, but I don’t know how accurate that is and don’t know that we can do anything about the high numbers, considering we are so close to the head of the spring. Readings for Nitrate and Nitrite have been basically nil with test strips and I have stopped trying to measure for them.
Hoping someone will have a solution to at least slow the growth of FA!
I fought FA all summer long last year and eventually cleared the pond of the floating mats by the end of the fall using an aquatic rake – good workouts. Well, the FA is back with a vengeance. I have been reluctant to use chemicals in large part, because our pond is spring fed (about a gallon every 2-3 seconds) from the uninhabited property next to ours. I have felt that any chemical we add will be too quickly diluted with inflow of fresh water from the spring.
I take recordings each month and typically measure pH at 7.45 using a pH meter and Alkalinity and Hardness of 720 and 300 respectively, using test strips. Both the last 2 numbers seem very high to me, but I don’t know how accurate that is and don’t know that we can do anything about the high numbers, considering we are so close to the head of the spring. Readings for Nitrate and Nitrite have been basically nil with test strips and I have stopped trying to measure for them.
Hoping someone will have a solution to at least slow the growth of FA!