Hi, I sure do appreciate your website. I've used it before and found it very helpful. We have a 3/4 acre pond that we dug in agricultural land two years ago. It has a clay bottom and with additions of well water through the summer, stays pretty full. It is 12 feet deep for most of the pond, kidney shaped with a 1/2 slope on the sides. Due to slight erosion, we're losing the 1/2 slope and are starting to have a problem with green algae. I raked it out once a week last summer, and here we are with our first warm spell (Sacramento, CA) and I'm already having to rake it and it's only March! We have routinely kept barley hay in a large net over the aerated portion of the pond (center bottom, diffuser). We have blue gill, crappy, perch, mosquito fish, and about 5 catfish that have been in there about 18 months, and haven't seen any dead fish at all. We do see tons of baby fish swimming around. We were advised to put large mouth bass into it this Spring, and that is what we plan to do (maybe a dozen)? Our problem is water quality. We don't know if the algae or the sometimes cloudy water is caused by the high nutrient level of the soils (ag land) or if we can improve it by adding some "natural bacteria" or something like that. We haven't used any chemicals so far. We mostly want the pond for swimming and natural beauty. Fishing was never a priority... so we were wondering about maybe even putting in koi to control the algae... any suggestions! I really need help, as I don't look forward to raking algae every week for the rest of the pond's life!
