In the summer time, ponds are lovely things. You can sit beside them in the evening and listen to the water cascade over a waterfall or other water feature. You can put solar lights around them so that you can sit out there until dusk, reveling in the warm weather and the cool breeze in the evening.
Then comes fall. With fall comes leaves, and with leaves come all sorts of pond headaches. You spend a weekend cleaning out the pond. You wish you’d never gotten a pond. You know that you need to remove the leaves from the pond before they clog the filter and the pump or suffocate the fish, but it’s a lot of work.
How can you avoid the fall pond blues?
First of all, if you are considering creating a pond, choose a location that is close to trees but does not have overhanging trees that will dump their leaves right into the pond. An evergreen shrub is an excellent choice for a pond. It will provide shade and will drop its leaves only gradually, making life easier for you.
Plan ahead. If you know that your gorgeous maple is going to drop its leaves in October, get a pond net. Cover the pond with a thin, almost invisible net that will capture the leaves. Every few days, remove the leaves from the net and you will no longer feel the need to scrub the pond from top to bottom to get the leaves out. Your net will do the job.
If your pond has just a few leaves floating on the surface, you can remove them with a handheld net. Or better yet, learn to live with a leaf or two. A few leaves will decompose easily and become part of the pond ecosystem, and they’re pretty when they float on the surface of the water. Really.
How do you maintain your pond in the fall?
Image courtesy of witus titus at stock exchange.