Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Fertilization Help please... Healthy bloom? I'm thinking not.

jpsdad, I worked with a Homeowners Association a few years ago. 18 ac BOW, max depth 9'. Basically what I think happened is that a developer built homes around a swampy area, and built up the outflow a bit to get deeper water. Highly eutrophic water. They would have both winterkills and fish kills in the summer. Long story short, they didn't have a big enough budget to properly take care of their water.

They needed an aeration system and at least one treatment to help strip out nutrients from the water. We put an aeration system in half the pond and in August the half that didn't have it experienced a summer kill one night. Visibility was 12" due to planktonic algae. By the end of August, the pithophora was bad, the coontail was getting really thick and in the areas that didn't get wind the duckweed/watermeal was a solid blanket.

It didn't help that half the homeowners liked the 100+ resident geese that were on there ALL year......... The next year they said they didn't have the $$ in the budget for the 2nd half of the aeration system, and we just treated the problem but didn't do any work to fix the problem. Year 3 we just threw in the towel, and didn't submit a bid to keep treating the pond.