After the clean water makeover of the Blue Peter pond earlier in the year, here’s Katy last week when we topped it up with clean rainwater.
The good news: because everyone had taken great care not to top up the pond with tapwater, conductivity was still only 115. Very encouraging.
Plenty of baby newts, and a good mix of other animals: on Big Pond Dip the cleaned up pond scores a good 38, mainly becuase of the damselflies and alderflies.
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August 17, 2009 at 11:10 am |
Help! I have a wildlife pond – no filter, no fish, just newts and frogs, and in the last two months i have found a horrible light brown jelly that bubbles on the surface of the water. I skim it off, and then a few weeks later, there it is again! Does anyone know what this is?
Philippa
August 17, 2009 at 11:42 am |
Hi Phillipa – do you have any pictures of the jelly?
Send them to me and I’ll post them.
Jeremy
October 15, 2009 at 10:45 pm |
I, too, have been skimming off brown jelly for some weeks now. My pond is new – I dug it in March this year. No fish, no frogs, newts etc. Pond-skaters, a lot of damselfly activity earlier in the year, some snails introduced (from a pond where brown jelly is unknown) which seem to be growing well. Plants seem to be doing OK. No artifical aeration. Blanket weed builds up and I remove most of it. I have a bag of barley straw in there (which probably needs replacing). The brown jelly is definitely jelly-like to the touch, firm-ish. It doesn’t contain any clearly visible eggs. The more experienced pond person who gave me the snails suggested I googled “brown jelly” in a pond – but apart from Phillipa’s question, it doesn’t seem to google… Can we look into this a bit more?
October 17, 2009 at 9:02 pm |
Hi Denise – wonder if you’ve got any pictures of the brown jelly?
Jeremy
July 12, 2010 at 4:55 pm |
did you get any pictures of the brown jelly?
I have clear jelly too and a yellowish kind in the shape of a slug as well as hundreds of newts eggs which were only laid recently – what are the first two and can I look forward to the pitter patter of lots of tiny feet?
October 1, 2010 at 9:53 am |
I too have exactly the same brown jelly but its quite dark and seems to have clear harder egg shapes in it. my pond is new and in a similar condition to Denise’s. it’s been appearing for several weeks now. Do you know what it could be?
October 1, 2010 at 10:08 am |
Hi Everyone – if you’ve got any pictures of this jelly stuff, do send them to me (jbiggs@pondconservation.org.uk).
Jeremy