Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Muddy water Tea color and desilting...newbie needs help with pond.

I am brand new to this site and am hoping you can help. I have a 3/4 acre pond in VT that has a tea tint in the sunlight and several inches of silt on the ledgestone bottom...visibility is 10-12 feet. The pond is fed by a runoff creek through a section of cattails and possibly a spring. What is causing the tea color? Is it the silt? Can the silt be pumped out? What can I do to make the water clear or is this not possible? Other than the color/visiblity/silt...the pond is without any noticable problems. Thanks for any help or advice. Also, I think I incorrectly posted this thread in the dam section earlier by mistake...sorry!

It's probably and organic stain. If you have a lot of cat tails around you might be getting water from a wetland where there will be some accumulation of organic matter in the water. You should simply take a sample of water and leave it sit for a couple days. If the color discipates then it is likely not an organic stain, but fine suspended particles. After a couple days if nothing settles out then you can try a little treatment on the water sample. Competent housewives useually keep some Alum in the spice rack for cooking. Take a little bit of that and stir it in to the water sample. If nothing happens after about 20 min, it is almost positively an organic stain. Sometimes it helps to fertilize the pond with a source of nitrogen. I would suggest sodium nitrate. This will help narrow the carbon to nitrogen ratio, hence speeding up organic decomposition. Give it a try, if nothing else, it will be fun to figure out where the color is coming from. Good luck, Aaron