Cleaned out the pond

The other week when it was nice, I happened to have a week off. Our garden is south facing long and thin and we use to have a 15' x 12 pond which was amazing and I miss it very much. We closed the pond down 19 years ago when my son was born, I now wish we had put a fence across rather than close it down. Anyway we have a small pond which was desperate for a good clean does anyone know if you can buy long gloves (similar to those vets use up cows bottoms) for scrabbling about in ponds it was a horrid sticky, smelly business. How do other's clean their ponds?

 

have a look at these
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oasis-Pond-..._sbs_lp_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=051VV3WB8T3JYR182Z3E

 

The year I moved here (almost, but not quite, 4 years ago) my first "mission" was to tackle the natural pond. It had a lily, a big iris, some fish/newts/frog/spawn.

I had asked locally for someone to come and clean/restore it (pre-GC days) - he was a rip off merchant and long story short, he drained it, took what he fancied aka I never saw some of the original fish/newts/plants ever again!

But: what did I learn? (because that is the most important part, after all!).

To give a thorough clean (if it actually needs it), you can move your fish/plants to a temporary holding station during the cleaning process (e.g. a paddling pool). Gloves are not "required" (but if it is stinky, a peg on the nose might be!) unless you have broken skin - in which case it is simple wisdom to keep those parts protected and water proofed.

Excess water from the pond is a valuable source of nutrients which can be distributed on your other garden plants - *you* may not like the smell, but your plants may well like the goodness of it

I would advise ( and others will correct me if I am mistaken) to only take out what is abundant/invasive. Even though *we* may have grown weary of something does not equate to the wildlife becoming jaded with it!

Let us know how you go about it and how successful you are

 

I did a welding and steel fabrication course for a year when I was 17 til I was 18. We had this stuff that I only know as 'barrier cream' which we had to put on our hands and face and any skin we were daft enough to expose to all the nasty filth that blows around in a fabrication workshop. We were told, at length, that this stuff is like an extra layer of skin (although it did just rub in), in that nothing nasty (within reason) could pass through the barrier cream.

I have no idea what it was called (other than barrier cream) but I remember it was waterproof to the extent that we only had to apply it in the mornings, and were assured it would remain effective for the full working day, no matter how many times we washed our hands. In fact to get it off, at the end of each day, it was a thorough wash with swarfega and a small amount of clean sand for its mildly abrasive effect.

I don't know if that cream is still available, or how to find it if it is (given that I don't know its brand name), but I reckon if it can defend against high temperatures, high intensity UV radiation (from the various arc welding stuff), huge quantities of thick toxic smoke, the dust of various ground and/or vapourised metals etc, then I reckon it would also protect against pond microbes.

 

Yes it is a preformed pond.