Be Excellent To Each Other

Our water levels have been dropping quickly. I did wonder if we had torrential rain and flooding if they would end up over the lawn.

I drove past the reservoirs outside Glossop today (twice, fact fans) and they were really, really,low. Most of the water was being held in the top one,the lower one was basically mud flats.

Meh, they get like that every year. Come October, they'll be overflowing again.

We did all the tests on the water today, and it all seems fine. We topped up the water level too, I think it could do with just a bit more though. Blanket weed seems to be our main issue, so we can focus on getting that sorted out now.

You can get stuff for Blanket weed not cheap if I recall

Top the pond as high as you can, it will drop in this heat, I'm topping mine up once a week.

Blanket weed, other algae and to a lesser extent duck weed can be controlled using barley straw bales. As they decompose they release hydrogen peroxide and other stuff; algae can't cope with the minute pH changes but fish, newts and so on are fine.

So we're told anyway, we've got some to try.

It turns out that the UV filter also has the spongy bits that need to be cleaned out. we had a go and it pumped out a lot of thick green sludge for a while, but seems to be running clear now. Of course we then had to top up the pond again. We pulled out some more blanket weed and have a treatment arriving tomorrow.

I did read about the hay, and we might try that if this doesn't work, but I'm hoping that clearing out the filters will help to make a difference. It seems to be a situation where prevention is definitely better than cure, but I suppose it's all a learning curve.

Well the pond has cleared by a depth of at least 18 inches over night. I can see stuff I had forgotten was there - as well as the fish! They came straight for food this morning too, probably because they can actually see it now...