Hi....I love working in my garden and sitting by our pond watching our fish and listening to the water! I am happy to have found this forum as I really need some advice. My husband built this pond a number of years ago and just this year we are experiencing a problem we have never had before. The pond actually looked like we had taken a bucket of mud and thrown it into the pond. I've uploaded photos of what it looks like now and will now describe the advice we received from the pond place that we frequent. Before seeking advice, we went ahead and emptied the pond and refilled it with fresh water and that worked short term, but we could see each day it was getting muckier and muckier. We actually emptied the darn thing again and the same thing happened, although it's not near as bad as the worst photo here where you can see we were in the process of draining it. Nothing has changed in our landscape since we built this pond. We actually have no grass, as our backyard is a rock garden with succulents. This side of the backyard has flagstone laid down where the grass used to be and which has been there for several years now. We do have a bog, but when this happened we decided to pull out all of the plants that were there and fill it with new plants. Our pond is fairly small..approximately 700 gallons. We have 6 fish..'no koi' and one shark and two lillies (all of which are doing well) and then of course the new plants in the bog. So..we go by the pond place with photos of the pond and the woman there tells us that we didn't need to empty the water out, that this is a natural process having come out of the winter season *never happened before?* and hands us a bottle of Water Garden Starter and says that will do the trick. Nope! Call them back up and they tell me to purchase Water Clarifer and THAT will do the trick. Since they are a distance away I headed to Petsmart and picked that up. That did not work either. I took a water sample to them and it was perfect btw. We go back again and talk to someone else who tells us that water clarifier would not have done the trick..but handed us a bottle of Water Garden Cleaner (boy but that stinks!!) and said to use the appropriate amount (one ounce for our size pond) every three days and to give it a couple of weeks and that should do the trick. He did say that having replaced the bog plants would hinder the process alittle since they needed to take root. At any rate..This is where we are at and I'm hoping someone here can suggest what actually might resolve this issue. The last picture shows the pond looking its best at the moment but that was helped b/c we had an extreme amount of rain in our area and it helped to flush out the pond some. Thanks in advance and H E L P!!
