Hello all

[Buzzy Beans]

Just found the forum (at last) and now I will hopefully be able to receive help, thoughts and ideas about the largish garden pond we have in our garden.

We moved to this property 7 months ago and now we have redecorated the house and are getting on top of the garden, my attention is now being concentrated on the pond. It is a butyl lined and approximately 6 x 4.5 x 2 mtrs., it has nowhere near enough soil/sludge/gravel at the bottom so the 5 water lilies are planted in containers, but there is nowhere near enough oxygenating vegetation, yet despite this the water is crystal clear!

The big MAJOR problem I have is that the last owner totally overstocked it with fish. At a rough guess when we moved in there were possibly as many as 300 fish, including some beautiful long flowing fan tail goldfish and masses of small almost black fish some of which are fan tail(ish), there are also 3 quite large dark grey to black fish that have a body shape similar to a trout, they are very shy and are normally sulking around close to the bottom of the pond.
To reduce the numbers we put up a post on our villages Facebook group and were able to find new homes for 82 of them, but we still have far, far too many and I earnestly want to get the numbers down to possibly as low as 15 to 20.
My problem is of course catching them as it is so darned difficult, but now with the water lilies all growing it is nigh on impossible........... any ideas please?

Some time ago at a former property I dug a large butyl lined pond and stocked it very carefully from day one with a large number of plants and only introduced 6 fish which grew finally into quite large specimens. The pond was totally self managing and I didn't even have to feed the fish, it was brilliant and this is ideally what I would like to get back to at this garden.

 

[Lisak1]

Welcome @Buzzy Beans ! Your pond sounds lovely and you are on the right track for reducing fish load. Don't be too hard on the former owners - those fish may have reproduced on their own and you will probably find that's an ongoing situation. At nearly 15,000 US gallons, 300 goldfish isn't really that bad. That's quite a good sized pond! We have about three dozen in our pond, and room for plenty more for comparison sake.

Anyway I hear you on trying to catch the fish - they are wiley! If you aren't averse to pumping the pond down, you could try that. Less water means less room for them to hide. Or some have built fish traps - I think you can even buy them - that you bait with food. They swim in and they can't get out again. Or what about a big net and two people in the pond, one on each side of the pond holding the net and herding them all to one small area where you could catch them more easily? Kind of like a commercial fishing operation!

Hopefully others will have some tried and true ways to catch fish and will chime in!