MAINTAINING YOUR POND

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Pipes that feed stream water to bypass ponds often clog in spring. A "digger dam" in the stream just above the intake pool will usually sweep silt around the pipe, and in conjunction with a screen and/or trash rack, will keep the inflow clear. For clearest passage through rough spring water, some pondkeepers find it simplest to close off side pipes at the source.

In the book Aquaculture, authors Bardach, Ryther, and McClarney recommend keeping silt out of fish ponds with a saran filter, a plastic mesh akin to today's grainsack material. For ponds fed by sidepipe, they recommend capping the outlet with a saran sock, kind of a "pond condom." For ponds with a natural-channel feed, they suggest trapping silt in a saran-bottomed box at shoreline water level. Not a bad notion, especially where fish — or fish keepers — are vexed by especially silty water.

Yet here in a forest watershed of tightly knit soils, my pond needs no filter. Besides, from the foot of the inflow, I like to dive into the water, not into a box. So in spring I use an old logger's trick for clearing roughed-up streams: I lay a hay bale crossways in the channel to filter out silt. Later, when the water warms up, I shovel out a wheelbarrow or two of spring silt, fine fill for the puddles that settled in the dam after excavation. The marsh marigolds that I planted in the inflow channel help hold the earth in place, too.

Stones cleared from the embankment after excavation become a thrifty resource, piled by the spillway for springtime repairs. This riprap can be paved in the inflow channel and along patches of muddy shore. Incidentally, rock paving is recommended both as an antidote for banks that erode under wind-whipped waves, and as a barrier against fish poachers and pond unpluggers like otters and mink.

To finish off the rites of spring on a modern note, I suggest you look at that sulfurous bruise that appears on ponds thawing downwind of industrial smokestacks. All winter, the ice has been catching polluted snow and rain. When it melts, six months of accumulated acid rubbish sinks into the pond. It's a bad time to stock fish. Better wait a few weeks and let the pond flush. Those hockey clearings won't help much unless snow is moved off the pond, or at least as far as the spillway, where it will flush out quickly. Lime or wood ashes are a longstanding remedy for acid pH. Anywhere from 10 to 100 pounds of agricultural lime may be needed. It's best to test the water and correct it in small doses. What's really needed, of course, is a dose of intelligence in high places.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print