We are renting a house with a farm pond in the back.
I’d say it’s about 1/8 of an acre , it has duck weed and some moss on top and lots of leaves and muck on the bottom.
Without spending a ton I’d like to clean it up and put some sunfish etc in it
What would be my best option at the best cost
Thank you

The best bang for the buck is to pump out the water, rent heavy equipment and physically dig out the muck and accumulated excess nutrients.

Give https://naturalake.com/ a call for bacteria.

From everything I've read, good bacteria isn't going to do much unless you add aeration. Herbicide would be the easiest thing you could do to make the pond fishable at least.

For minimal cost, go by a swimming pool net that is used to get leaves and junk out of the swimming pools. Use that to get the duckweed and algae out of the pond. A few bucks and a considerable amount of time is what it will take.

Also consider buying a smelt dipping net from Bass Pro or Cabelas to remove floating pond stuff. A 1/8 ac is not big and can be relatively easily pumped dry and get some one with a long reach track hoe to dip out all the sludge that is the main problem. Propose to the house owner to give you a cost reduction of the rent it you manage the project. Pond clean up benefits them the most by making the property much more valuable.

Killing all the plant growth does nothing for removing the cause of all the growth - annual accumulated nutrients that get recycled. Duckweed and moss are big signals that the pond is over enriched with organics and nutrients and on a downward spiral of the natural pond aging process - aquatic succession. Clean out rejuvenates the pond ecosystem.

Another case in point to illustrate this. A year ago, at the time of ice out, I noticed a very unusual lime green algae on the underside of the ice and the shallows were coated with it. We never had algae under the ice in the winter and it seemed an unusual amount of algae for the cold time of year.

Then after ice out and as water warmed up I battled algae like never before. As fast as I raked it out it came back. By mid summer it was nearly half of the pond. I worked repeatedly through summer and fall and it kept floating up from nowhere. Finally we ran out of 'nutrients' and water conditions switched and the algae just disappeared. I was stumped for most of the season to figure it out as nothing else changed with runoff or amount of feeding going on.

Then something clicked as to what may have been involved. The late summer before I wanted to improve aeration to the bottom of the pond. So I got a small plastic 'basstender' like dinghy and put a 6hp outboard motor on it. I waded into the shallows and my son was in the boat running the tiller of the motor. He would gun the engine which would force the boat into me. I would hold the front and then stabilize it while he would prop wash a big plume behind it. I would then rotate the front of the boat so his back end would go back and forth in a big arc blowing up huge plumes of leaves, dirt and debris. We would do each arc for 20 sec or so and then move over and do it again. It was hard work but we did that all the way around the pond over a few days.

I couldn't really measure the depth of muck before and after but I know we at least turned over a foot of the bottom debris out to a depth of about 6 feet all the way around. He then ripped around the pond perimeter in circles creating lots of wake and water movement till we had 'whitecaps' coming in the shallows.

Everything settle down and I didn't think about it much at all. I'm thinking now that I probably stirred up an immense amount of buried nutrients and therefore had a pretty intense algae bloom including in the winter and in the spring summer beyond that.

I hope that this spring/summer we'll have much less algae to deal with as hundreds of pounds of algae were carted into the woods. AT ice out this spring there was zero algae. Hopefully our nutrient load is less and yet someday we still will need a long arm excavator to come and truly excavate a couple feet of the bottom out to refresh the ecosystem.

CC, yes you did, and that's why you had the results you had.

Question is, are you still glad you did the nutrient stir with your boat at this point?