Awww... thanks
@Big Lou!
Here's a related question for all of you who either don't have gravel/rock bottoms or had them but took them out due to muck/gunk/debris accumulation... what exactly IS all the gunk building up on the bottom of your ponds? Where does all that stuff come from? Organic material I can see - leaves blow in, your pond plants drop dead material into the pond... that I get. We net it out, and what we can't get with the net breaks down very quickly into a fine silt, which then breaks down even further into... well, nothing. I assume that's what gets consumed by all the microscopic critters that live in the pond and the snails that creep around the bottom. But other than that - is it fish poop?
Because here's a weird fact - in all the many hours of feeding and watching (and yes, even wading with) our fish, I have NEVER seen one poop. We had aquariums years ago (my husband has loved fish since he was a boy) and one of my least favorite things was seeing the fish swim around trailing poop for MILES. Not pretty. But we literally NEVER see our fish poop - ever. Nor do we ever see fish poop in the pond. Now maybe you might say "oh, your fish are very modest and they all go poop in the tunnel!" Well, guess what? I stick my feet in there too! And I've used my little underwater camera to film and poked around in the tunnel - what? I'M CURIOUS! - and nothing! So what's the deal? WHERE ARE YOU GUYS GETTING ALL YOUR GUNK?!?
And one more fact that I'll share - this is not just my pond that looks like this or
@Meyer Jordan 's pond. I have seen dozens of ecosystem ponds that look exactly the same. Gravel on the bottom. No muck. No gunk. No debris. Some have bio-falls. Some have bogs. But all were clear to the bottom. So it's not an anomaly is my only point. It is indeed possible to have a clean pond with a rock/gravel bottom.
As a side note - the gravel you see in my pond is not deep. I would guess it's less than an inch deep, maybe even less than that. When you consider a rubber lined pond as opposed to a natural dirt bottomed pond, the one thing you don't have in a lined pond is that interaction with the soil underneath. So where a natural pond could sustain a much deeper substrate, I think a rubber lined pond would suffer if the gravel were too deep. That's just an opinion though. Someone may tell me I'm all wet on that one!
