Getting a Leaf Net for Your Pond This Fall

It’s going to be time to do things to those ponds.

If you have a birch or a service berry, you already know the leaves are starting to drop. Through this heat and the drought, they actually drop a lot of their inner leaves earlier than when we naturally go dormant on all the other deciduous stuff.

But if we can get those into leaf nets on the ponds, now we prevent a lot of cleanup later on. Get a good quality leaf net, something you can stretch really tight up off the surface of the water. As the leaves come down, they’ll lay on that net, the wind will blow and clean the net off for you, or you hit it with a leaf blower. But if the net sags into the water, once those leaves become wet, they start to rot in that water. Wet leaves are not fun.

We want to make sure we stretch the nets tight across the top of the pond. If you have a really large pond, that’s not always an option. If it’s a long stretch, 10, 12, 15 feet. So there, a lot of times we’ll get like a pool pillow and we’ll inflate that pool pillow, put that underneath there. And what that does is it gives the net a rest point in the middle of the pond and keeps it up off the surface so that you can keep all the leaves blown off the net, so it doesn’t lay down in the water and get kind of nasty. 

A good quality net is super important. You can buy a really cheap net out there, but if it doesn’t make the winter and you get a heavy, wet load of leaves on the net and the net tears, and it drops all that in the pond, the few bucks you saved just wasn’t worth it. We’ve got a good woven style net at the nursery, we usually get three to five years out of that net. A little bit more money on the front end we have found is definitely worth it because it costs you less in the long run.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).