If Im not mistaken dont koi dig up the bottom,anyway do you have pastures?>could like cow poop horse poop be getting in your pond?Do you have areation,I bought one from zetts fish farm, They have a website,We have a windmill running ours.When it was cleaned out in 04 were the fish weeded out?You need to because of too much interbreeding not good.Too many fish,did your pond ever turn over.Ours did too many fish we were told.We were getting ready for sons wedding on gazebo at the pond.I came home 3 days before wedding to find hundreds fish floating dead all sizes 18" bass 12" cat fish,just sick,we gathered all dug big hole buried them,stink...

Hi bulldinkie ... I don't have aeration and yes, the fish were weeded out in 04 ... I lost most of them the year before, that's why I had to dig out the pond. It had silted in so much, there wasn't enough room for them to survive in the winter. I did the same, dug a big hole.

I looked at the pond alot this weekend, it was hot so the dogs went swimming ... and it's more greenish water than brown ... so something makes me think it has to do with the amount of sun, and not enough plant coverage.

I'll see if I can find my local Soil & Water guy and ask him.

I dont have plants in mine at all.Tell me about cleaning pond.Mine is about an acre we want to clean it out and make it bigger.Grandkids love fidshing.Did you lose many fish during clean out andhow did you refill,we should have done ours before all the hurricanes,Maybe test your water too much of something.

I had a local rural company do it ... they do excavation and other earth-moving jobs, and are the local pond building experts. You need someone who understands what they are doing, not just someone with heavy equipment.

They used a pump to pump the water out and emptied it into my back pasture which slopes away from the pond ... I had already lost most my fish from a bad winter kill because the pond had too much silt.

They brought in a bulldozer and excavator and ended up right in the pond moving the gunk out. Since I was no longer using my back pasture for horses, they put the gunk in that pasture and then leveled it when they were done. If you can't do something like that, they'll have to haul it away (additional cost).

My neighbors & I spend the day catching crawfish, frogs, turtles, etc. (Even the guy on the bulldozer helped) Anything we saw that we could save, we put in buckets and they ended up in other neighbors ponds.

We dug it out in November, it re-filled itself (spring-fed, could see the springs bubbling up when they got to the shale bottom). The bulldozer was sparking on the rock when they reached the bottom. It re-filled itself by January.

In the Spring, I re-stocked with minnows, crayfish, large mouh bass ... bluegills and frogs came back on their own, and I eventually put in grass carp, goldfish and koi.

I'll post some pictures when I get home. Best thing I ever did.

I read through th 70 page catalog on Zetts website, and guess maybe my pond is OK. He says a clear pond is a sterile pond. My fish all look healthy, plenty of little ones swimming around the edges and shallows. He says Koi are good to have, since they eat algae, and mine have doubled in size in a year.

Might restock some more crayfish next Spring and talk to the guy at my local fish farm. But for now, I'll stop worrying about it.

bulldinkie ... here are some pictures for you:

Unfortunately, I didn't have a digital camera in those days so I didn't document everything like I do now! LOL!

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My niece and mu dog Brandi int he pond after it was dug ..

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My other niece adn friend:

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ty for the pictures,were getting ready to do ours,I wished he would have done it all this rain were getting would have filled it quick.

good luck ... post some pics when it's done!

it will still fill quickly, we're getting lots of rain now ... I did mine in November and it was filled by January.