Clearing the pond

One of my biggest and messiest jobs I try to do each winter is to harvest the water chestnuts and give the ponds a clean out. Last year I harvested only some of the water chestnuts and ran out of time to do much more before the new shoots started appearing, so I chose to just leave it for that season. It was a big mistake, a big heavy, muddy, messy mistake that I've had to pay for in extra work this year.

The roots of the different water plants had grown so dense that they completely filled the pond, so completely they formed a perfectly shaped canoe (my pond is a recycled canoe mould). They had grown so much that when the pond was filled it only left about an inch of water free on the top surface. They were so dense that it was almost impossible to harvest any water chestnuts as they were  tightly bound up in the roots and difficult to find.

During summer the canoe pond was buried under all that green. 

I couldn't actually pull the roots out or separate them by hand they were packed so tightly.They formed a solid mass and I couldn't lift them. Hubby came to the rescue by suggesting using some timber off cuts to form a fulcrum lift point, putting the length of the timber under the front edge and lifting it up enough to put another piece across under it to hold it up. We then got a large serrated kitchen knife and had to cut our way through, bit by bit. We worked on it across two days until finally the pond was cleared.

Large clumps of the matted roots and the odd plant it was just too hard to pull apart and save.

After lots of cutting and lifting I almost had the canoe pond clear

I've kept a lot of water plants, vietnamese rice paddy herb, pickerel rush, vietnamese mint and taro to repot and replenish the pond, just enough though so that the local green frogs have some protection, but now will have plenty of water for laying their eggs. The water chestnuts have been moved to a new pond where they will grow on their own, hopefully making it much easier to harvest next year, and giving me a bumper crop now that they will have some space to grow again.

Do you have a pond? What water plants do you grow?