Sherwood, how many did you put in the pond? Without underwater weeds, your algae problems might be worse than they were last year. Without underwater weeds to feed the TGC, you probably see turbid water from them rooting around in the bottom to find things to eat. With them following the mower, that tells me that they are running out of things to eat. Mowing the clippings into the pond is adding nutrients, which is not a good thing, try to blow them away from the pond if possible.
Typically you want 7-14 TGC per vegetated acre.
I believe I have around 14 in a 2 1/2 acre BOW. Much of it had extreme amounts of coontail growing in it. The guy I bought the fish from was adamant that I was buying too many but I wanted to do what I thought I needed to try to do.
I truly wasn't expecting that kind of decimation of the plants and I do worry about the repurcussions. Our water is still very clear at least. As for the mower, I almost always try to keep it from blowing into the water to limit organic matter entering the pond but I can't remember why I decided to allow for it on that day. It looked like the carp were eating the clippings although that wasn't my intention. They do eat my fish food at least. I've seen them do that.
I'm not sure what I am going to do other than take a wait and see approach. Talking to my wife about it the other day, she says I am always finding something to worry about with the pond management. At this point, we both feel that beating the grass back was the most urgent and important thing we could do. That was the biggest reason we did a full draining and redo in the first place.
As for the FA I expect at least some kind of bloom in the Spring. We've had it the past couple of Springs but it goes away as it warms up. We rarely saw it before the redo.
Hopefully the catfish and carp will feed on it, but I'll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it. Maybe it will decrease in severity, maybe increase. I am extremely curious to see how things turn out moving into our third Spring and Summer after the pond refilled.
One thing is for certain. Although I am sure my work has been far from perfect, the improvements have been enormous for the most part and we are incredibly pleased and relieved to have put the time and money into working on it. The difference is night and day with the mess we had before and the beautiful situation we have going now both visibly and recreationally. Of all the problems, the coontail infestation was the worst.
