opps

[ericka]

After a difficult winter, I didn't get my leaves up before a lot of them ended up in the pond. More than usual, this spring I have my 21 year old son home doing college on zoom to help. Any ideas on how to keep debris out next winter? I have some gold fish and a lot of lillies. I worry about my dogs falling in on a cover and getting tangled up and drowning. The Doberman has fallen through the ice following my small dog on to the surface.

 

[addy1]

There are those here that make a pvc arched frame and cover it with fine netting during leaf drop. You could also use deer fencing, leave it up all winter, (over the arch down to the ground) it will keep your pups from falling in.

 

[Tula]

We keep a fence we bought at Lowes around our pond as we once had a senior dog drown in our pool.....devastating. We net the pond to keep debris out.

 

[Mmathis]

@ericka Tell us a little more about your pond. How big is it and what kind of trees?

 

[Laaf]

I just let the leaves fall in and scoop them out from time to time.

 

[BKHpondcritters]

I just let the leaves fall in and scoop them out from time to time.

That's my modus operandi as well.

 

[Lisak1]

I'm a scooper too, but most of the leaves we get happen during the winter and come from neighbor's yards. We don't really have any big trees near our pond. So when I'm scooping oak, maple and elm leaves, I know EXACTLY where they came from!

 

[BKHpondcritters]

I live in the middle of the woods, so I have no one to blame for my 'leaf issues' but myself! We do run a horizontal section of deer fence on the western side of the pond during the fall to stop 'blow in' during the winter. That way, once they're off the trees & on the ground, they don't continue to cause problems.

 

[poconojoe]

I do the PVC frame arched way up and covered with nylon pond netting. Pond netting is basically the same stuff people use to protect their fruit trees from birds.

 

[addy1]

We do run a horizontal section of deer fence on the western side of the pond during the fall to stop 'blow in' during the winter

i do that when I remember, most of our leaves come from neighbors to the west. Our yard collects the entire neighborhoods debris, predominant wind blow.

 

[Lisak1]

If I were going to net, I would do the arched style and hope they would just slide off. Much better than a heavy net full of wet leaves in the pond.

One tip - any plants around your pond that keep their structure over winter... leave them standing until spring. I just filled a trash can with leaves today that I raked up from outside the pond. All of them were stopped from going IN the pond by the plants that I didn't cut down in the fall. I won't keep leaves from fall in, but it stops a lot of the blow-ins.

 

[poconojoe]

I took my net off a few days too soon. Dummy me. I should have checked the weather forecast.

The next day it got real windy. Gusts 40-50 mph.
I had to scoop a bunch of leaves out and been doing that for a few days now.

 

[BKHpondcritters]

I took my net off a few days too soon. Dummy me. I should have checked the weather forecast.

The next day it got real windy. Gusts 40-50 mph.
I had to scoop a bunch of leaves out and been doing that for a few days now.

Oops. I've had that happen before when we took the leaf fence down early. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can't time things quite right.

 

[GBBUDD]

Oops. I've had that happen before when we took the leaf fence down early. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can't time things quite right.

With a larger pond I use a pond vac to suck up debris off the bottom. Maple, dogwood, chestnut, arborvite, ash . All are no problem sucking them up. Shortly after falling to the bottom OAKS how ever are a real pain and take much longer to suck up . But in the spring after they have soaked for 3 or 4 months can be cleaned up with the vac. In short if you have oak leaves around your pond I would get the strongest vac money can buy. One trick I do for a rocked pond is the take off all the attachments and u use just the tube but I place an extention onto the end of the tube about 2 inches long secured to the bottom edge of the pipe.. So that the vac tube rides above the gravel as I drag It across the bottom and it does not suck up the rocks

 

[Lisak1]

Oh and I should have added - check your neighbor's plans. No sooner did I finish cleaning up leaves from around the pond than his landscapers showed up with their gas blowers to blow all of HIS leaves into MY yard... what are the chances? I was just sitting down enjoying a cool beverage when WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRR! So we had a cordial conversation about leaf etiquette and they redirected their blowers!