I have never lost my interest in the pond. I just was super obsessed with it the first year and fussed and fussed. The more I fussed the more things went wrong. The second year I did pretty much nothing to it. I cleaned my pump filter when needed and fed my fish just a very little. Had some water hyacinths on top. All went very well, no problems at all. I would come here and lurk when I had time but just didn't post. I am so glad I put in that 300 gallon in ground. It was one of my better ideas. I have enjoyed my pond and being able to have some fish so much. This was a big surpise to me to see the baby fish this year. Of course I know from reading many other posts that fish breed in the ponds but I didn't notice anything unusual going on. Plus I figgured if they did spawn that the eggs or the small fry would get eaten. Appareantly not so. So at least not all of them. I am really glad to have a little baby rosey red minnows, I really wanted to add more anyway. Now the fish did it for me. As for the goldfish, I will have to watch and see if they turn out to be shubinkins. I think I might try to take that feeder fish out of there although how I will be lucky enough to net it, I don't know! Thanks for the welcome back ;-)) I will take pictures of the pond and post them as soon as I can :-))

I think you have a mess. One thing seems certain. You are going to need some sort of "nuclear" option to actually rid the pond of minnows. You can try to temporarily reduce the numbers by trapping and maybe some other means, but you won't get every last one, and the breeding will begin again. One "nuclear" option is to remove the fish you want to save, then poison or drain and disinfect the pond. This is a really big deal with a decent size pond, but it is probably the only way to assure you get the minnows out. I have one more suggestion that is not quite nuclear, but close. Put a 6" bass in the pond. It will eat all the minnows and small goldies. Well... maybe some medium size goldies as well. If you leave it in long enough I think you will be able to disrupt the breeding cycle of the minnows. If the bass eats all the breeding age minnows, and you leave it in long enough for any tiny minnows to grow up to "bass snack" size, you will end up with no minnows. Then you can restock the goldies, if the bass ate them all. Your koi should survive this, your full size goldies probably will survive, and some of the frogs might survive as well. I know this isn't a great option, but you do have a mess and there aren't going to be any good choices.

Hi Digger: as to filtration and aeration, I have a pump with two spillways/bulkheads for aeration, and for filtration, I use heavy planting: water lily, anacharis, cattails, arrowhead plant, water hyacinth, water lettuce, parrot's feather, azolla, and one other flowering plant I can't remember the name of. As far as water temp, it's been in the 70s and low 80s outside for a few weeks, was on the hot side before that, but the water temp never got over about 82 as I measured it. I have not added fish since I initially stocked it, and the eggs came via plants from one of my other ponds where there have been no problems. There really isn't much gravel at all and it is in a very sparse single layer, and only in some places. All that being said, there were no dead fish today, and the one black moor who has been on the floor of the pond for a week took a turn around the pond at feeding time, which was very encouraging. I am sure the neighbors were confused about the giggling and hand-clapping when I saw him. The remaining fish (with the exception of one baby shubunkin) are now active and normal looking. And just to make it all slightly more vexing, I saw a new group of fry swimming around right in the midst of all of it. I will keep my fingers crossed that tomorrow morning things look even brighter. Maybe the water change I did yesterday helped some. (?) Thanks so much for your generous assistance.

I think you may have to resort to a predator fish, sadly. You will never clear your pond of minnows - they breed constantly. I fear you will always have eggs hatching. How big is your pond? Would it be realistic to empty completely, relocating your goldfish temporarily? Although I've heard tales of minnow eggs drying up completely and then hatching once they are re-hydrated. And your plants are probably infested with eggs, too. Ugh. What a problem!