Ingrid,

Our mid-April looks a bit warmer than yours. Water temp: 64 degrees.

Phyllis is away at a conference for a 'Clean water for the world'
project she has been working on. Interesting. British, Indonesian,
Ugandan, US, Canadian team members...internet meetings usually.

While she has been away, I have been working on clean water for OUR
world..i.e. cleaning the berm filters. Our hyacinth filter had about
2" of muck in it...and lots of big tadpoles from last year. I pulled
the hyacinths, anacharis and duckweed with a salt water net. Easy. I
stripped off last year's hyacinth leaves (dead from winter and ready
to become pond muck if not removed.) The plastic tent worked very
well. Survival of tented hyacinth: perhaps 90%. Untented: perhaps
10%. I netted out the big junk in the pond with the salt water net.
Then I drained the pond and flushed it with pond water by turning on
the inflow valves. Total time for a 4 x 8 pond: 30 min.

I did the other berm ponds and the upflow 55 gal. barrels last fall.
Took and hour for the two ponds and 3 barrels. Each barrel has a mesh
bag of strapping tape and a bottom drain.

That does it for the year.Total annual maintence of filter system: 1.5
hours. Man, do I like veggie filters with drains!

I will breed some shebunkins in one of the berm ponds and probably add
some platies and swords as well once things warm up. We get four or
so generations breeding by the fall chill. The tropicals add nice
color to the pond.