Week of April 25: Pond Start up and Mar-Duke post Rain

The week has been rainy and cold.  Not that misty rain that one thinks of when one thinks of spring.  No this was multiple days of downpours.  Very very cold downpours.  Wind chill yesterday was 36 degrees in the 2" down pour.

Needless to say, there was no real planting that went on this week.  Oh I tried today.  I went out to scope out the allotment.  I even took the shovel out of the car and make a few half hearted swings with it.  It wasn't happening.  Moving with tens pounds of goo on your boots is hard and getting the goo to fall nicely off the shovel without destroying your soil structure just doesn't happen after that much rain.  So Mar-Duke was a wash this weekend.  One thing I did note though was geese.  Lots and lots of geese wandering around and yanking out plants.  I was glad for my three sided fence.  My plot so no evidence of geese or other traffic through it.  I will need to make it a four sided fence soon.  The other thing of note was that the fence saw 30 knots of wind this week and held.  That's good news.

I did have some productivity in the pond arena.  I got the bog filter and waterfall filter box cleared out of winter sludge and got the pump connected and flowing.  This is good timing for this.  I have not been feeding the fish regularly because the water is still too cold but I suspect that will change soon.  I need the bacterial filtration established some before feeding resumes.  That requires temperatures about 40 degrees and I have that.  I also want the water moving to prevent any  mosquitoes from hatching.  Mosquitoes do not like moving water.

I took a few swipes of the leaf net at the bottom of the pond just now to see how bad it was.  Verdict was BAD.  There are probably about 500 pounds of wet leaves down there.  The methane smell when you pull them off the bottom can give you a headache right away.  This will be a project I will tackle in spurts.  When the water is this cold, the koi's immune system is not up to par.  I only want to disturb a little bit of water at a time so keep their conditions as decent as possible.  It is important to get this off the bottom though.  I can host a whole lot of bad bacteria an parasites and with the ducks hanging out here again this spring who knows what is being brought in.  Here  is a picture of the pond this afternoon.