I have been getting the same question about our ponds all summer, so I figured I'd answer it in a public forum for anyone else who might be interested but may not see me to ask the question.
What is going on with the ponds at the entrance?
Of the three ponds visible from the entrance drive, #'s 12, 13 and 18, one of them looks good. Two of them look bad. #12 has blown up with Algae like it had in 2011 and previous years. #13 looks fine. #18 is about 3.5' low right now.
Starting with #12. I refer to this as a pond, but it is more accurately described as a water retention area. It was not designed to hold fish, feed livestock, or go swimming or canoeing in. It was designed to make you afraid of hitting a golf ball into it. The guys who built the pond while well intentioned were probably not aquatic experts and did not see the nightmare that they were creating. This pond is 4 ' deep with a rock bottom (it cannot be dug any deeper). When you have a pond that shallow light penetrates to the floor of the pond and creates an environment where algae can grow. This is the same problem that this pond has had for a long time. We found a solution last season with the Tilapia. Unfortunately, I thought that a wait and see approach would be better on the pond this season to see how bad the problem came back. It came back with a vengeance. I was too late getting the Tilapia out and now we are resulting to chemical control methods. If you are using chemical control methods why don't you spray it all out? Great question! Because when we kill aquatic weeds they sink and decompose under the surface of the water. When Algae decomposes it uses oxygen. Guess who else uses oxygen in the water....Fish. There is not a lot of oxygen to be had in a 4' deep pond if we expend all of the oxygen on a plant burn off we will be left with floating stinking fish, and maybe if we're lucky get our picture on the front page of the newspaper. So, we are progressively spraying out the algae around the banks about 1/8 of the surface area at a time.
#13 Pond. It looks great! This pond is 13 feet deep and has good deep banks the water is clear you can see strait to the bottom on a sunny day from on top of the rock wall. I am not recommending that you go out on the rock wall, we frown upon that.
#18 Pond. This pond has been up and down all year. right now it is down 3.5'. The reason that it is so low is that our water line has been interrupted temporarily. As you probably know we receive effluent water from General Mills across the river and have been for the last 4 years. This year General Mills had a construction project that sat right on top of the pipeline that feeds #18 pond on their side of the river. The pipeline was not built with the idea of supporting a structure in mind when it was originally built. They had to dig up the pipeline. Stabilize the ground with rock. Install a new pipeline and finish off the grade with stable material. This project was estimated to take 3-4 weeks. With the conditions becoming extremely dry I estimate that the timeline will be closer to 3 weeks than 4. This project was started somewhere around the 20th of August. So, we are about two weeks into the project. I know that the pond looks low right now, but I have seen it much lower before. We are not at a critical level yet. But if we do reach that point I'm sure that out partners at General Mills will find a way to temporarily relieve the issue if needed.
That's my over-worded answer to an simple five word question.
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