Fixing the Pond

So there's this pond in our backyard just off the corner of the back deck.  It had fish in it at one point.  For 3 years actually (even after the filter quit working, and Greg quit bothering to clean it out or even feed the fish.)  They were some resilient goldfish.  Here's what it's looked like for the past several months...

 As you can see, it's nothing but gunk.  A little bit of water, a lot of leaves, sticks, and algea.  To make things worse, the dogs like to try to drink out of it.  Lovely, right?

We debated whether to dig the whole thing up and just fill it in and put grass there or fix it up.  We both liked the idea of having a nice pond and some fishes out back, so we opted to fix it up (and we'll do a better job at keeping it up this time!).  So the first step was to empty out all the crap.  And of course Greg jumped on the chance to go buy a shop-vac!  We registered for one for our wedding, but didn't get it.  A quick trip to Home Depot and we were in business.

About 2 hours later we were all cleaned out. And I trimmed away some of the limbs at the base of the tree to clean that up too.  It was way too messy before.

 We found a good size hole in the lower pond, which we had anticipated might be there.  We bought some pond filler to take care of that.  We might have gone a little overboard, but we weren't really sure what this stuff would do.  It basically filled in the hole and hardened into a spongy blob (that's the best I can describe it!) And it expanded as it hardened...so yeah, a little overboard. But we're good now!

We bought a new filter at Home Depot, and it's working great!  

So we filled it enough to cover out blog (to test it out), and we'll let the filter run for a few days and clear the water up.  Then we will pull some of the weeds growing around and in between some of the rocks and fill it with some fish!