By Helen Stedman
04 Nov 2026

Monitoring and Managing the Pond

We have been working on the pond over the summer, monitoring the water quality, seeking advice about how best to manage it and applying for funding to help us carry out some work on it.
We have surveyed the pond five times, and submitted the findings to FreshWater Watch, who we bought the montioring kits from, and who are running monitoring projects all over the country.

The water level held up well over the hot summer, although it smelt strongly of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulphide), which indicates it was under-oxygenated. This is possibly because of the algae on the surface, which metabolised the available oxygen. The nitrate and phosphate levels were generally low, except for the November reading, which mysteriously produced moderate phosphates - and we have no idea why! Turbidity (cloudiness) levels varied - the water in November was as clear as crystal!
Graphs of levels from the FreshWater Watch system are shown below.

We are now moving into another phase, and attempting some management, with manual work done by the Pond Dippers and other volunteers. We are hoping to remove 30% of the bulrushes and willowherb that dominate the pond to allow other species a chance to develop, and for open water to allow light into the pond. For this we need to hire a skip, or possibly Hippo Bags as there will be a lot of plant waste to get rid of.

We are looking for funding to hire the skip, and also for volunteers to brave the muddy waters, so if you can help us, please contact us at greenappleton2021@gmail.com. We have a crowd funding page for donations, at https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/greenappleton so please consider dropping in a sheckel or two! Thanks very much.

We will continue to monitor - to look at the impact of the vegetation clearance and to inform anything we do in the future, so watch this space!