Removing the pond leaves

As reported earlier the netting I installed over the pond was working, but not perfectly. Although some leaves were getting into the water, most of them were not.

With most of the overhead maple leaves down, this weekend was the time to get them off the net -- and I wasn't sure how I'd do this.

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The way I looked at it, there were only two practical options: removing the net, shaking off the leaves, then putting the net back on, or using a leaf blower.

I went with the leaf blower option, borrowing my neighbor's blower/vacuum. (I knew that removing the net would likely cause many rips, so I really only want to do it one time.)

Using it as a vacuum worked really well, although sucking leaves out of mid-air (which is what a net essentially is) doesn't work as well as sucking them off the ground.

Still, I was able to get most of the leaves off with little effort, although holding that blower with my arms fully extended to get the leaves in the middle was not easy. I sure wish the supports hadn't disconnected:

Some leaves right in the middle I couldn't reach, as I wasn't able to both pull up the netting to get them out of the water and hold the vacuum at the same time:

Overall, it went quite well though.

Although not perfect, the netting is much better than trying to pull the submerged leaves out later, which is what I did last year.

The fish seem happy with my efforts. Here you can see one of the bigger original fish on the right, and one of the biggest of this year's spawning efforts, which seem to have been going on all summer (as there are some really small fish in here too). There are probably three or four dark-colored fish in this shot too -- they're everywhere! (As a reminder, all of the fish in my pond are cheap comet goldfish.)

I'll need to keep the netting on for another few days, but will probably remove it over the weekend and pull out a bunch more of the plants. I expect to see some ice on Wednesday morning!

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