Fellow Pond Owners,
I find myself in a need of a bit of sage counsel and although I have been reading and benefiting from this forum for several years I only recently joined so I could ask some specific questions.
I had my pond built in 1997, I have enjoyed it tremendously even considering I got some bad counsel in the beginning about aquatic planting, pond depth and oxygen. Originally I thought my family could take an occasional refreshing dip in the pond on hot summer days and had the pond dug to 8 feet close to the dam. There is a small island in the middle of this approximately � acre pond. I ordered a lot of different kinds of plants to provide oxygen for the fish. In the ensuing years I have had several learning experiences including one winter fish kill and a few less than refreshing dips in the pond. But having the pond as a renewable food source and fun fishing hole has been totally successful.
Now to the heart of the problem: Marisela Water Clover. You can read about this water fern Here:
http://nas.er.usgs.gov/taxgroup/plants/docs/marsilea/marsilea.html My pond is completely surrounded by this stuff. Since I feed myself and my children out of the pond I do not want to use chemical intervention. But I may have an opportunity to turn a bit of bad luck into a solution that just might work and I want the considered opinions and suggestions from some folks that know a lot more than me. This past winter or spring sometime my pond was poached to nearly empty of almost all fish over 10 inches including 3 strains of LMB, the sterile Israeli carp that Virginia made me get a permit to stock to eat some of the aquatic weeds but they don�t touch the water clover, Blue Gill and Red Ear Sunfish, 3 out of 4 Koi that I stocked after reading they will eat the 4 leaf clover, they didn�t eat mine but were a great help to the sterile carp eating softer weeds, about 40 Blue and Silver CC plus minnows, frogs, crayfish, pond and rams horn snails and fresh water mussels. There was probably more but that is beside the point. Right now the pond needs to be almost completely restocked with LMB, CC and RES. I do have a small leaky pond that I could get another liner for that could serve as a holding tank to keep a small breeding population of most forage species to aid in restocking when the rehabilitated pond is ready.
It seems to me that a solution might be that while the pond is empty for all practical purposes of fish of any real value, maybe it might make sense to drain the pond and somehow remove the noxious weeds and start over. This also gives me the opportunity to be more selective in restocking, take the opportunity to enlarge the whole pond to 1/3 � � acre, fill in the 8 ft. depth to a more reasonable 4 - 5 feet, remove the above water part of the island to about 18 � 24 inches of water and add structure to the pond bottom to increase fishing enjoyment. After draining the pond and giving it some time to dry out I could hire some heavy equipment to scrape the pond bottom, removing the root mass and changing the structure of the pond bottom as described above. This may mean that the pond is empty for a couple of seasons then a couple of years for the fish population to grow to the point of harvesting.
Ok, there it is, my great idea for fixing my broken pond. I need a lot of constructive criticism and ideas to sort through, think about and choose from. I look forward to getting to know you and hope to learn a whole lot.
Kru Heller
Powhatan, Va.
