After months of having to do very little except add bacteria to the established back pond, the time has come to get my hands wet again!
Today’s cleaning regimen included:
1. Rinsing out the filter box. I don’t know how the pump continued to run with all that garbage around it. The coarse and fine mechanical foam layers were thick with algae, and the inlet screen required a thorough scrub down. There were even some unidentified plants sprouting in there! A quick swish of the biological material and a little innoculent completed the spring tuneup.
2. Cleaning the bottom. Absolutely disgusting. I scraped the bottom with a net and brought up four months’ worth of fish crap, algae, and dead leaves. Amazingly, the fish knew that the net was not for them and did not panic. I left the algae growth on the sides so the fish would have something to munch. Today was the first day that the water temperature topped 60F, so I won’t restart feeding them prepared food for a little while yet.
3. Changing the water. Biological activity is on the rise, and the water is approaching the temperature where ammonia and nitrite can be a problem as the filter re-establishes itself, so I did a 25% change-out. With the new water and the green water, the energy of the fish surged.
I stirred everything up , so the water turned pea green. It should clear up in a couple of days. Next weekend, I will clean the bottom again, as well as the filter, which should have caught all the garbage that escaped my net. I will also tend my overwintered plants at that point.
Here’s what it looks like. One can barely see the fish though the murk.
