Pond Update

On June 25th I directed our house catchment tank's overflow to the new pond. Not knowing if the rain would continue or not, I didn't want to rob water from our house water cache. I was only willing to fill the pond with water that would otherwise go to waste. Well, the rain has continued, and rained, and more rain. It's rained a little bit every night since! So the pond is rapidly filling up. But it's also turning greenish already, so I need to add all the other pond elements in order to get the algae overgrowth under control. 

Today I transferred some water plants to the pond.  They have been helping to keep the mini ponds healthy, so now they can help with the big pond. Water hyacinths, water lettuce, a green filament type thing, and another stemmy plant with round leaves that I've forgotten the name of. These grow with no help from me and reproduce, creating abundant excess. So I'm continuously harvest the excess for the compost bins. 

Early this morning first thing I netted about 50 guppies from the mini ponds and transferred them to the big pond. They've been in there all day and look fine so far. With a new pond I'm never sure that the initial fish will survive, but so far so good. If they are still alive in the morning, then I'll transfer another hundred or more. Their number one job will be to eat the mosquito larvae. The mini ponds currently have too many fish in them, so the timing it right to use the abundant population to stock the new pond. 

The mini ponds also have small snails. I noticed that the water cleared up in the mini pond that I inadvertently introduced snails to. So I transferred snails to all the other mini ponds, and all the others cleared up too. I concluded that snails were a valuable asset to pond ecology, at least here in my climate. Therefore I added about a hundred or more snails to the new pond. 

Now we wait and see. Will the water balance out ok? I won't know for a couple of weeks. In the meantime I'll work on finishing the edging and landscaping.