Dirty wildlife pond

[frostedviolets]

Please help me fix it

It’s just heaving with brown mulmy crap!

I have tried to clear it by hand but it’s so fine it just disperses and makes the water murky...

There are loads of newts resident which breed every year so they seem happy enough but I’m worried the mulm is going to cause issues, I keep reading about it reducing oxygen for example.
Plus it just doesn’t look very attractive!

There’s no filter because it’s a wildlife pond.

Not the clearest image.
The bulk of the mulm is visible in the middle of the pond.

I’ll try and take a clearer picture later when I go out to do some pruning and pull some of the blanketweed out.

There's no good time to clean out a wildlife pond, but autumn is the least awful, in the gap between most of the baby newts leaving (some won't leave the pond until the next year) and frogs settling in the mud at the bottom to overwinter.

So try and relax in the knowledge you can't do anything about it yet. You may find the pond improves immensely once we're properly into the growing season.

When you remove blanket weed, don't just heap it on the side - you'll need to check carefully for baby newts who won't be able to get back into the pond by themselves.