Cleaning the duck pond

One of the discoveries I made when I first got ducks two years ago was that they will make a mess of a pond in little time at all.  Despite having extended and deepened the pond last year, we still need to drain, clean and refill it on a regular basis. The weather has been warm and dry for most of the past two months so the water level of the pond has dropped. What was left was quite revolting so last Thursday I drained it and poured the mucky water over the beds I planted with potatoes recently. I cleaned out the silt at the bottom, which also went on to the potato beds, and then refilled the pond with fresh water.



I am not a great fan of using tap water for watering the garden or filling the pond. Water may be a renewable resource, but the energy that goes into cleaning it and pumping it is not so I use tap water sparingly. However, there are times when that is simply not possible. The water butts on the allotment were empty and there was no other water supply. So, we borrowed the water supply from a nearby house (with their permission of course) and refilled the pond. It took about 3 hours to get it back up to the right level. My estimate was that 2.5 tonnes of water went into it.



As you can see, the ducks were rapidly back on to the water and were loving it.