Notes from Havenwood

Pond clean-up, New Bench, Bouquets & Autumn Colors for September

September garden pond cleanup at Havenwood

Welcome to Notes on Havenwood…

where I share more of the inner workings of my one-acre town garden in western Pennsylvania. We are located in a Continental horticultural zone 5/6 between the Great Lakes and the Appalachian mountains. Our September has been a dry one, as usually occurs here and over much of the continental US at this time of year.

This was the month to muck out the garden pond and so you will get at look at our process, as well as see our baby snapping turtle. There was a new white bench for the Birch Walk, in preparation for much sitting this autumn, and the cut flower harvest in the Kitchen Garden has been epic.

Let’s see what’s going on around Havenwood this September…

Pond Clean-up

Cleaning our Garden Pond has needed doing for a couple of years, but it is a pretty intimidating task, especially as our pond is always so full of wildlife that we have hated to pull it apart and disturb them. Pond plants grow extremely fast, and it is really delightful to watch them take off. But thinning them out is something that needs to happen. The cycle of ponds is to fill themselves with plants and debris until they become bogs. This is called eutrophication:

“Eutrophication is the process in which a water body becomes overly enriched with nutrients, leading to the plentiful growth of simple plant life. The excessive growth (or bloom) of algae and plankton in a water body are indicators of this process.”¹

If one wishes to keep a garden pond with some open water in it, then the excess plants must be removed. This should not be done earlier in the year, as it would disturb frog and toad mating time, as well as small tadpoles. September is a good time as the water and air temperatures are still warm enough to not make it unbearable, and yet the frogs and fish are not yet ready to bed down in the muck at the bottom for the winter.

Here is a bit about our pond clean-up in 6 steps…