 So as extension agents we know that it's really important to you that you're putting a lot of money in your pond and you know you want to understand the health of your pond on your own and you want to be able to communicate with the professionals that you see. So either your local extension agent or even a private pond consultant. So today I'm going to show you different ways that you can build your own really simple tool. It's called a SecchiDisk. This tool is very simple here is a few examples and it has a pretty basic structure. We have a circular disk about eight inches in diameter. This one's made out of wood and you notice it has the four quadrants and they're too black and too white. It also has a post or a pole and it can be made out of various materials and it'll be measured in inches. This one is measured up to 36 inches. We also have one here and it's exactly the same structure. This one's made out of fiberglass and it actually has a rope attached to it and it's also measured with tape or marker or whatever you'd like to use and you could even use something as simple as a bucket lid to create the bottom disk. So the whole point of this tool is to measure the transparency of your water. This is things like the turbidity. It's going to relate to things such as the fertility in your pond including algae. If you're having sediment issues you could explain to a professional that this is the secchi depth of the water and it could show how turbid the water is and how bigger issue a sediment is. When using this we'll use this one for an example. You're going to want to do this in open water on the side of a boat preferably just so that you can get to like the middle depth of your pond. You want to do it on a clear calm day nice and sunny. Make sure you're not using any sunglasses or polarized lenses and all you're going to do is drop this into the water and you're going to look straight down and when you cannot tell the difference between the two quadrant colors that's how you know you've reached the depth and so the water line will come up on the pole and whatever the measurement is is your secchi depth and the rule of thumb is that you want to keep the water between 18 inches to 24 inches. So once you go ahead and measure if you find that your secchi depth is over 24 inches that means that you can see further down than 24 inches that means your water is pretty clear and you want to fertilize until you get back into that 24 to 18 inch range. If it happens to be a depth that's less than 18 inches you've probably fertilized too much and you want to cut back and this is important because you can be out there checking your ponds because fertilization can change over the set of a few days and so instead of having someone come out and check it for you you're able to build this on your own really inexpensively.