Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - What’s the easiest way to get rid of leaves

Without manually digging or sucking them out?

Tía

There was one of these powered weed removing machines for sale locally for about $100,000. No idea what they actually got in the sale or what they cost new. They come with an outboard powered sickle mower and also front attachments either for digging/lifting rooted leaves or a mesh for gathering and pushing floating weeds. Maneuverable, powerful. I don't know if there are several varieties of these machines and I'm not intending to advertise one brand as I have not personally run or seen the results but just sharing what another inventor came up with. Happy to have the links deleted if they break any rules.

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With those, you have to be positive that the weeds that are in your BOW aren't the kind that will spread from pieces of the weed that are left behind.

A couple of inches per year? yes. A couple of feet per year? Unless you mechanically dredge it, that's not going to happen, and $1,000.00 isn't a big enough budget for that. Using bacteria you can't undo in a year or two what took decades to accumulate.

Call that place in Dearborn, MI. that Bill linked to and get a quote from them. You might be better off doing nothing, banking that $1,000 every year until you have enough saved up to get it dredged. Then once it's dredged, install bottom diffused aeration and start fresh.

Sorry for the bad news, but I am not "politically correct" and don't tell people what they want to hear. I tell them what to expect in real life.

I had a discussion with a customer 2 days ago about him renting a dredge to suck out feet of accumulated muck/peat from his pond. His budget for that was 100x of yours. It turns out that he's only got enough water in the pond to run the dredge for 18 hours before it pumps all the water out. (3,000 gpm is what the dredge moves) Then what? Now we are looking at plan B.

Pay attention to what Bill said. We did a two year test at a customers place that had 4 ponds, all in the woods, all about the same size and same depth. We aerated one with a grid based aeration system, aerated one with a grid based aeration system and threw in bacteria, just threw in bacteria with no aeration and left one alone with no aeration and no bacteria.

We found that compared to the pond that we left alone:

The pond with grid based aeration had 4" less muck build up.

The pond with grid based aeration and bacteria had 6" less muck build up.

The pond with bacteria and no aeration had 2" less muck build up.

The pond that we left alone had roughly 8"-10" muck build up over the 2 year test.

If you don't want to or can't put up a fence, leave tall grass or tall dense marginal plants grow up around the pond to trap the leaves before they get into the pond. Then rake the leaves away or burn the whole pond bank in late winter before things start growing.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was standing waist deep in the water digging out leaves with a pitchfork.

I want one of these.

That is pretty awesome.

Instead of paddle wheels, I would rather have a trolling motor with GPS steering. You could probably program it to ensure you raked every single square foot of the bottom.

Also might need an outrigger barge to dump your leaves and muck with some drain holes above the water line so you can dump watery muck for hours of work at a time.

Maybe someone on Pond Boss could create a nice "side hustle" that would be in great demand for certain parts of the country.