A little pond work

The other day after cutting down the bananas and preparing them for winter I decided it was also time to remove the pond netting.

I usually don't leave it up this long because it will get frozen into the ice, but since we haven't had any of that yet I've been able to keep it in place extra long. Hopefully this kept more leaves out of the water -- there seemed to be a lot of them in there last year!

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The first thing I noticed is that the pebbly shallow area was full of leaves:

It seems that the netting pulled up over here, allowing leaves in:

I think there should have been more netting on this side. Maybe a deer kicked it and ripped it out from the pegs? In any case, I pulled all that I could reach out...

...which looked so much better! (Remember that I haven't yet fixed the holes in the liner, so the water level stays an inch or two lower than it should right now -- these rocks should all be under water!)

It seems that there is a leaf problem on the back side of the netting too...

...where the leaves collected and weighed the netting down enough until they were all submerged.

Easy enough to clean out, although lots of tannins have already leached into the water, making it quite brown, like a strong cup of tea. That happens every year though.

A bit of raking so the surrounding leaves don't blow into the water, and that's job done for this year:

I do think that I kept the most leaves out of the pond than I ever have before, so we'll see how things look in the spring. Last chore of the calendar year? Probably not.

I suspect that I need to scoop quite a bit of muck out of there at some point, and I know that there is at least one nursery pot and a couple of rocks at the bottom too. Maybe the fish and frogs like that, but I think that they would appreciate having a little more water depth instead of a thick mud layer.

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