Algae attack? Try a quick pond twiddle

A pond is one of the very best things you could ever do for wildlife in your garden, not only because they fulfil the needs of so many different creatures, but because they put back something that has been lost given that hundreds of thousands have been destroyed in the wider landscape.

But a pond does take time to mature. In effect, a new pond is really just a hole in the ground full of water to start with. It is an ecological baby that needs time to bed in and grow up.

And while it is developing and maturing, one possible problem that I’m sure many people have encountered is the dreaded algae.

There are all sorts of different sorts of algae. They are primitive plants, some just a single cell of life, others with each alga made up of many cells, and some growing as filaments.

And it is the latter that tend to be most obvious in young ponds. It is often called blanketweed. In spring, hair-fine strings of green begin to spread under the water. With few other plants to complete with, they feed greedily on the nutrients in the water until they create a green, gauzy blanket under the water.

Then, with the water warming and sunlight beaming into the depths, some rise to the surface, buoyed by the oxygen they produce. Here, they turn into an unsightly bubbly scum.

Now I should say at this point that these algae are totally natural and they serve valuable purposes for lots of creatures. It’s just that few of us want too much of them.

You can find various products on sale to combat blanketweed, many involving barley straw or barley straw extract, but some where it is difficult to work out exactly what is in them. I’m always very wary of anything that doesn’t tell me what it is.

So, I have two preferred methods.

The first is algae twiddling. When the blanketweed forms its strands underwater, get a long firm stick like a bamboo cane and twirl it through the blanketweed as if making a stick of candyfloss. And this week, that is exactly what my new pond called for this week.

Pre twiddling:

Ten seconds later, post twiddling:

And the results of my twiddling - yum - about to be put on the side of the pond in case anything is in it and needs to crawl back into the pond.

My second method, if any algae has scummed on the surface, is to fish it out with a net.

Sound a faff? I rather enjoy it! Algae twiddling is wonderfully therapeutic and simple, and who doesn’t enjoy a bit of pond dipping with a net?

The likelihood is that, as your pond matures, algae amounts will decrease, as long as there is no big nutrient source feeding the pond. That means avoiding adding plants with rich compost, not adding goldfish, and not topping up the pond with tapwater (which can be heavy with algae-boosting chemicals such as nitrates).

The added value of algae twiddling is that you can have a good nosey of what is going on in the pond as you do it. My new pond went in last November, and as I twiddled this week, I was surprised to see an eft (baby newt), showing that Smooth Newts have already bred successfully. Plus there were legions of pondskaters and these mating Large Red Damselflies.

It is wonderful how quickly a new pond fills with life, and as all the waterplants I've added grow and fill out, that's how the pond will really find its balance and I'm keep the algae in check. But for now, I'm happy to twiddle when I need to.