Welcome to the board, Old John! You'll find a ton of useful information here. Dig in!

Like you, I bought acreage in SW Indiana with a pond. My pond was so grown up with willow trees along the banks that it was impossible to fish. Imagine a green wall built all the way around the pond. The first summer of ownership my boys and I cut and hacked the willow wall down to almost nothing. I'd read on this forum about how willow trees are among the most thirsty trees and I blamed them for contributing to a big evaporation loss. My pond is totally dependent upon runoff from a small watershed.

I haven't seen much of a difference in evaporation now that the willow trees are gone. That may be because we didn't have much rain later in the summer and I have only one summer of experience with the willow trees gone. I'm hoping that with all that leaf surface area gone, I'll see a reduction in evaporation through elimination of transpiration.

Like you, I get a large mess of leaves in the pond, but there isn't anything I can do about it since I have mature forest on the windward side of the pond. The experts here recommend keeping leaves out of the pond because they represent more organic material rotting and using up oxygen that the fish need.