Autumn leaves and the net I decided not to use

25 October 2025 · 3 min read

The pond sits under the edge of a birch and downwind of a large sycamore next door, and from the first week of October the surface is covered in leaves by every evening. The standard advice is to stretch a fine net over the whole pond until the trees are bare, so that the leaves cannot sink, rot and feed the algae next summer. I bought a net and put it on, held down with bricks, on the 8th of October. I took it off on the 15th.

The week with the net was miserable to look at and worse for the pond’s visitors. A robin got a leg caught in the mesh and had to be freed, a frog that was still active in the mild weather spent an evening trying to get through it from the lawn side, and the net sagged into the water under the weight of wet leaves so that it did little that a rake would not. Also, I could not see the pond, which is the whole point of having it under the kitchen window.

The compromise is this. Every evening at dusk, or every other evening if it has been still, I skim the surface with a child’s fishing net on a cane, which takes about four minutes and lifts most of what fell that day before it sinks. Once a week I drag a rake gently along the bottom of the deep end and pull out what has gone down, and leave the pile at the pond edge for a day so that anything living in it can crawl back. The leaf pile then goes into a wire cage by the fence, which has become a hedgehog bedroom according to the droppings.

I do not try to get everything. A layer of leaves on the bottom is part of a pond: the newt larvae and the dragonfly larvae hide in it, and the frogs that spend the winter in the mud under the deep end seem to want it there. The aim is to stop the thick blanket that turns the water brown by December, not to have a clean liner. Last year, with no routine at all, I pulled out two full buckets of black sludge in March. We will see what this year’s weekly rake does to that figure.