Koi-Lo wrote, On 27/04/2006 15:40:
If you don't want to disturb the wildlife in the pond you can always
remove the dead plants. Remove the blanket weed by hand and start doing
small water changes to remove the dissolved solids and other unwanted
substances in the water. Carefully net out dead leaves. What I would
do is remove all the fish, frogs and tads to a small child's pool from
the Variety store and clean the whole thing out. Keep them in 3/4 water
from the pond, 1/4 clean dechlorinated water until you're finished. Use
a dechlorinator/Chloramine remover and put them all back. Watch the
ammonia level - it may not spike - it doesn't when I clean out one of my
ponds. All I do is rinse the filter when I do a clean-out so it still
has most of it's needed bacteria.

Looks like a nice pond. If you upright the plants that got blown over,
tear off a few handfuls of growth from the biggest plants, take out the
dead water hyasynths. It will look much better.

The waterfall is going, do you have some kind of filter in there? If so,
I expect the water is pretty good right now, but as it warms up the
decomposing plants might cause problems.

Trouble is that you have lots of nice frogs and tadpoles because of the
weeds and plant cover. They would not have laid in a bare fish pond.
Unless you want to stock it with koi and have clear water down to the
bottom, it's not worth wading in and emptying the thing. Pulling out
dead weeds and string algae should not disturb the tadpoles too much,
and your small shoal of goldfish will be pretty tolerant of all but the
worst conditions.

It should start to look really nice in the next few weeks.
David