I founded the company back in the late ’80s. My name is Mark, although they call me the Pond Guy around here.
I went to school for landscape architecture, but most of what you see here today I never studied in a textbook or classroom. We learned by doing. Over the past many years, we’ve slowly developed a system and an ecosystem that allows people to enjoy an ecosystem pond in their backyard with crystal-clear water, happy, healthy fish, and as little maintenance as possible.
What you see in our garden, from the time you walked through it today until you got back here, represents more than three decades of trying, trying again, and getting better and better.
How many people already have a pond?
Okay, so almost everybody. Anybody here who doesn’t have a pond yet?
Well, we’re going to sell you a pond today. You can come visit my ponds anytime you want!
Today’s seminar is part of a whole series we have here in the spring called Coffee with a Pond Guy. I view my role today as sharing the lessons I’ve learned over the years about how we make ponds easier to take care of, how we keep fish happy, and how we maintain good water quality.
A lot of what I’m going to talk about today is based on the Splash ecosystem pond that we’ve developed over the years.
How many people have a Splash ecosystem pond?
Okay, about half the room.
I’m going to briefly go through this ecosystem to give you an orientation on how we think about ponds, fish happiness, water quality, and maintenance.
We have several other seminars coming up throughout the year, including pond construction, waterfall construction, and a talk in May on aquatic plants.
I’m especially excited about the aquatic plant talk because, for the first time in I don’t know how many years, it won’t be me teaching it!
How many of you have ever been to Longwood Gardens?
Our May speaker will be Tim Jennings, the head aquatic gardener at Longwood Gardens. Tim and I have become good friends over the years, and he’s graciously offered to come talk to us about aquatic plants.
I’ll be sitting in the back with you guys heckling him!
Tim is amazing, and I’m really excited about that.
We also have a fish health and happiness talk scheduled, along with food trucks, live music, and all kinds of other things on the calendar.
But today, I just want to briefly talk about the ecosystem pond.
Ecosystem Ponds 101
The first step when we dig a pond is to dig a hole, right?
If you look at all of our ponds out here—from the turtle pond inside, to the Lily Pad, to the swim pond, and even our 300,000-gallon habitat pond out back—they’re all built using the same basic system.
Our ponds are dug with shelves. Each surface is perfectly flat and vertical: flat, vertical, flat, vertical.
We do this intentionally so that when we place the rocks, they don’t slip and slide around.
Then we place the rocks on those shelves.
Another thing you’ll see are plant pockets. All of our pond plants are removed from their pots and planted directly in the pond. I’ll explain why in a minute.
We also put a fish cave in the pond.
Everybody knows why we have fish caves: herons, bald eagles, and other predators are always looking for an opportunity to eat your fish.
The fish cave gives the fish somewhere to go during the winter, but it also provides protection whenever predators come knocking.
That’s the basic pond structure.
Skimming: 90% of the Filtration
Now we have a body of water sitting there, and pollen is probably the number-one nutrient source entering a pond.
Think about it: pollen gets into your pond 24/7, 365 days a year.
If you don’t have proper filtration, that pollen just sits there and becomes a huge nutrient source. It drops to the bottom along with leaves, twigs, sticks, debris, and fish waste. Eventually, all of that muck builds up.
Instead of letting that happen, we want to get the pollen and everything else out of the pond before the pond even knows it’s there.
That’s where the skimmer comes in.
If something falls into the pond, remember that 100% of the debris entering the pond is coming from above.
We use a skimmer to remove that debris before it has a chance to sink to the bottom.
We look at skimming filtration as 90% of the battle.
Ninety percent of filtering a pond is skimming debris off the surface before it has a chance to sink.
You’ll see that in all of our ponds. From the turtle pond inside to the habitat pond out back, the skimmers simply get bigger as the ponds get bigger.
We want the skimmer to be powerful enough to pull debris from one side of the pond all the way over to the skimmer.
The UPMC Pond
How many people have seen the pond we built for UPMC, the hospital?
If you ever have to go to the hospital, that’s the cool hospital to go to!
It has a 100-foot-long koi pond right at the main entrance. We built a courtyard around it with little seat walls, a bridge, and everything else. It’s a pretty fun place to visit, and we’re very proud to have been involved in it.
But think about the challenge of trying to pull debris from 100 feet away.
The way we solved that was by putting a waterfall at the far end to push debris toward the skimmer. We also had underwater jets pushing debris along.
By the time everything gets close to the skimmer, the skimmer is powerful enough to pull it all in.
So, just think about that in terms of filtration: skimming is 90% of the battle.
Biological Filtration
The secondary part of filtering the pond is your BOF filter.
A BOF filter is basically a series of nooks and crannies where beneficial bacteria and enzymes can grow.
Those beneficial bacteria and enzymes consume the remaining 10% of the debris that the skimmer didn’t catch—things like fish waste and other organic debris that are breaking down.
The beneficial bacteria essentially say, “Hey, that’s food. I’m going to eat that.”
They convert ammonia into nitrites. Then another type of bacteria consumes the nitrites and converts them into nitrates.
And that’s the only science lesson we’re going to have today!
If you have high ammonia in your pond, your fish are not going to be happy.
Ammonia is extremely poisonous to fish.
The second thing we want to get rid of is nitrites.
Green Water vs. String Algae
If you’ve ever seen a pea-soup-green pond—the kind where you stick your hand into the water and your hand disappears—that’s single-cell algae.
That algae grows when there are high levels of nutrients available to it.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about Lake Erie, an acre-sized farm pond, or a little 5-by-5-foot pond on your patio. If you have green water where your hand disappears, you’re dealing with single-cell algae.
We sell algaecides and UV sterilizers, but I’ve never professionally installed a UV sterilizer in an ecosystem pond.
We make a lot of money selling UV bulbs, but we’ve found that you generally don’t need one in an ecosystem pond.
The reason is that we’re not trying to kill algae. We’re trying to starve algae.
There are algae spores everywhere. We’re actually breathing them in right now.
If there’s a body of water with algae spores and there’s a nutrient source available, the algae is going to grow.
Our ponds stay crystal clear because we grow enough beneficial bacteria to consume those nutrients.
If there are no nutrients left for the algae, the pond stays clear.
So:
- Beneficial bacteria consume ammonia, which helps keep fish healthy.
- Beneficial bacteria consume nitrites, which helps control single-cell algae.
- The byproduct is nitrates.
Nitrates are essentially fertilizer for more complex plants.
That includes reeds, rushes, irises, water lilies, lotus, and other aquatic plants.
If you don’t have enough plants and you have too many nitrates, what do you get?
Stringy, fuzzy algae.
There are two basic types of algae we’re concerned with:
- Single-cell algae — causes green water and thrives on available nutrients.
- Filamentous algae — the stringy, fuzzy, hair-like algae that grows when excess nutrients remain available.
A little stringy algae is probably normal in a pond because it shows that you’re completing the nutrient cycle.
Plants as Filtration
The number-one place where all of this starts is the skimmer.
If you don’t have a skimmer, then you become the skimmer. You’re outside with a net trying to remove debris from the pond.
The second line of defense is your plants.
The more varieties of plants you have, the more nutrients you’re removing.
A green-leaf plant pulls out different nutrients than a red-leaf plant. Plants with blue flowers and plants with yellow flowers can also utilize different nutrients.
So, the more variety you have in your pond, the better.
It looks amazing, but more importantly, the plants are competing with string algae for nutrients.
This time of year can be challenging because the plants aren’t fully active and growing yet. That means string algae may start to take over.
Once your plants get going, we’ll talk about how to manage that as well.
That’s basically Ecosystem Ponds 101.
Does that make sense?
So, I either bored you or taught you. There will be a test at the end!
Water Lily Planting Depth
Audience Question:
When can you put the plants in?
Today is a great day to put plants in.
All of our hardy plants stay in the pond year-round.
For example, when we plant a lily, we ideally plant it at about 18 inches deep in a plant pocket.
If you have lilies in containers and you’ve been raising and lowering them, you probably don’t need to move them quite as much.
Hardy lilies will survive at 18 inches, and even around 12 inches, so leaving them at one depth can make things easier.
Audience Question:
Would three feet deep be okay during the summer?
Yes, they’ll grow.
The problem is that when they’re planted three feet deep, they have to expend more energy getting their leaves all the way to the surface.
When we grow lilies at our farm, we keep only a small amount of water above the roots. That way, the plants don’t have to expend as much energy getting their leaves to the surface, so they grow faster and become hardier.
In your pond, if the lily is three feet deep, it will eventually get there. But if you raise it up a little, it will be warmer, get more sunlight, and require less energy to reach the surface.
If raising and lowering your lilies is a pain, I would simply leave them around 18 inches deep year-round.
Retrofitting a Skimmer
Audience Question:
What if you don’t have one of your ecosystem ponds?
A lot of times, we’ll go into an existing pond that was built without a skimmer.
That’s actually our number-one retrofit.
As long as you have a flexible rubber liner, our typical skimmers—the ones you see on our ponds—will work.
If it’s a concrete pond or another type of structure, it becomes a little more complicated.
Audience Question:
What about a natural pond?
A natural pond is a different animal.
It’s very difficult to install one of our traditional skimmer/BOF systems in that type of pond, but we can do it.
Our habitat pond out back is a good example of how we approach something like that.
We can figure out how to skim a natural clay-bottom pond and how to install a BOF filter.
It’s more expensive than a traditional system because you don’t have the flexibility of a liner, but there are definitely options.
Spring Pond Cleanouts
Right now it’s springtime, and our crews are out cleaning ponds and getting them ready for the season.
How many people leave their ponds running all winter?
Quite a few of you. Awesome.
Everything you see in our gardens stays running all winter—my personal pond, our display ponds, and even the UPMC pond.
We do have a few customers who say, “I’m going to Florida for three months and I’m not going to be here.”
In that case, let’s shut it down.
But for the most part, we like to leave ponds running through the winter.
If you do shut your pond down, you need to maintain good gas exchange by putting a bubbler on the surface. You also need to make sure all of your plumbing is drained.
Now that it’s spring, it’s time to look at the pond you probably haven’t paid much attention to during January and February.
Maybe your neighbor didn’t clean up his leaves, and now you have a foot of leaves sitting on the bottom of the pond!
When we do a spring cleanout, we typically set up a temporary tank next to the pond.
Then we pump the water out of the pond and move the fish into the temporary tank.
For a DIY cleanout, we have pumps, orange discharge pipe, and temporary tanks available for rent.
When we do it professionally, we use a much larger pump and three-inch fire hose.
Once the pond is drained, we blast around the rocks and gravel to remove the muck and debris that have accumulated over the winter.
We’re trying to mimic what happens in nature.
Snow melts, water washes down streams, and everything comes rushing through. It creates a natural spring flush.
That’s what we want to accomplish.
How Often Should You Clean Your Pond?
You may look at your pond and think, “I don’t see a single leaf. I can count every rock and pebble on the bottom.”
If that’s the case, you may not need a cleanout every year.
Some customers have us clean their ponds every year. Some absolutely need it every year. Others may only need it every three years.
It depends on the pond and how meticulous you are as a pond owner.
I’m a very bad pond owner!
I have a 100-foot-tall walnut tree and a 60-foot-tall cherry tree, so I have leaves everywhere.
I neglect my pond, so I need to clean it every year.
But even if you’re very meticulous, I would still recommend a cleanout about every three years.
An ecosystem pond is a closed system.
We talked about the ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate cycle—the nitrogen cycle—but there are also many other macro- and micronutrients that build up over time.
Eventually, it’s good to give the pond a nice flush.
Our retail fish tanks have a constant drip of fresh water because we’re constantly flushing those systems.
The same concept applies to your home pond.
At a minimum, I recommend a substantial water change every year or two, depending on the pond.
When we perform cleanouts, we typically save 50–70% of the existing water, so we’re really only doing around a 30% water change.
Water Temperature During Cleanouts
Audience Question:
Do you have to wait for the new water to get close to the existing temperature?
Yes. That’s a great question.
Water temperature is important because you don’t want to stress the fish with a sudden temperature change.
During a cleanout, we often have multiple temporary tanks. We’ll start filling one with hose water as soon as we arrive, and then we mix the fish with their existing water fairly quickly.
We’re especially careful with larger koi ponds.
Goldfish tend to be a little more forgiving, but it still matters.
We recently moved all of the fish from our lily tank into our retail tanks, and we checked the pH, water temperature, and several other water parameters before moving them.
It’s similar to taking someone from sea level and suddenly putting them at the top of Mount Everest. The environment is different, and their bodies have to react to those changes.
So yes, we pay attention to that.
Spring Plant Maintenance
Once the pond is drained, we clean up the leaves, twigs, and other debris and then look at the plants.
At this time of year, plants are just starting to emerge, so there isn’t a lot of tall vegetation to deal with.
In my pond, I actually leave everything standing through the winter. The birds forage through it, so my pond looks pretty messy.
Then in the spring, we trim everything back and clean it up.
Fertilizing Water Lilies
This time of year, lilies get their annual feeding.
We use these water-soluble fertilizer tubes. They’re a slow-release fertilizer that we push down into the base of the lily.
We also use quick-release fertilizer tabs.
The slow-release fertilizer feeds the lily throughout the season, while the quick-release tabs give it an additional boost.
For maximum growth, we recommend doing the slow-release fertilizer once during the spring cleanout and using the quick-release tabs about once a month throughout the season.
The two plants we fertilize in the pond are primarily water lilies and lotus.
When we’re growing plants commercially, we fertilize many of them because we want to get them to customers quickly.
But if you fertilize an iris during the growing season, you may end up with a plant that is twice as tall and floppy.
Irises generally don’t need fertilizer.
Lilies and lotus, on the other hand, are heavy feeders.
We’ve grown Victoria lilies at the UPMC pond, and those plants are incredibly heavy feeders. We can go through a container of fertilizer in a week with a Victoria lily.
Those are the giant water lilies with leaves large enough for people to sit on.
Snails in the Pond
Audience Question:
I found some really strange-colored snails in my pond. Are there any snails I shouldn’t allow?
There are a lot of snails that can be problematic.
The snails we sell are the large trapdoor snails. They get to about this size and are live-bearing, meaning they don’t lay eggs.
They may have several babies at a time, which is manageable.
The problem is the tiny snails that lay eggs.
You’ll often see little black snails with egg masses that are incredibly large compared to the size of the snail.
Those can reproduce very quickly and can get into your pump and clog it.
Suddenly your pump is dead and you’re paying a thousand dollars for a new pump.
Audience Question:
Is there a way to get rid of them other than picking them out?
It depends on the size of the pond.
There are treatments we use in our growing tanks and greenhouses when we have a snail infestation, but you have to be careful because treatments that kill the snails can also affect other things you don’t want to kill.
The only snails we sell are the large, live-bearing trapdoor snails.
We like them because they’re visible, they don’t reproduce as explosively, they’re not likely to clog your pump, and they do a good job cleaning the pond walls.
Koi Eating Water Lilies
Audience Question:
My koi eat my lilies.
Anybody else have that problem?
Koi can destroy lilies, but we don’t see it as much in our ecosystem ponds.
One difference is that our ponds have rock and gravel across the bottom, and we plant the lilies directly into plant pockets.
When fish are in a pond with rock and gravel, they’re constantly cruising along the bottom, picking up pieces of gravel and spitting them back out.
When koi are in a bare-liner pond with a potted lily, they can get bored.
They see the plant and think, “What’s this? Let’s play with it.”
That’s when they can really go to town on the lily.
I see that much more often than I do in our ecosystem ponds.
You can read all over the internet that koi and lilies can’t coexist, but then I’ll just show people pictures of our ponds with koi and lilies living together.
Audience Question:
I have gravel and they still destroy them.
Sometimes they just do.
We have a protector in the store that may help.
It’s a net that goes around the lily. If your lilies are in pots, you put the net in the pond first, then put the lily inside it. The net has a floating ring around the top that keeps the koi from getting to the stems and leaves.
They’re located near the lighting department in the store.
Lotus can also help because koi don’t seem to like the fuzzy, spiny texture of lotus stems.
Of course, some koi are simply huge, and anything in their way is going to get destroyed.
I was in Japan in October looking at fish, and some of them were absolutely massive. Those guys are going to destroy anything that gets in their way.
And for the record, there are no lilies in the mud ponds in the mountains of Japan!
Trimming Water Lily Roots
Audience Question:
How often should you trim the roots of your water lilies?
When we build a pond, we plant the lily directly into a plant pocket on a shelf.
When the rhizomes start trying to move onto the next shelf, we’ll see that during the spring cleanout and simply prune them back.
We want the lily to fill its own shelf, but we don’t want it growing into another area.
If it grows across the pond, it can block the surface, interfere with the flow toward the skimmer, and make it harder to see your fish.
So we typically trim lilies during the spring.
You could probably do it in October while they’re dormant, but spring is our normal time.
Audience Question:
What if the lily is in a pot?
If the pot is starting to break apart or the lily is completely filling the pot, it’s probably time to remove it.
Take the lily out, clean off the roots, separate out some good rhizome sections, and repot them in a new container.
We carry fabric pots for this.
Some of the less expensive fabric pots can simply be cut open with scissors. The heavier-duty ones can be pulled up, dumped out, refilled with soil and fertilizer, and reused.
If the roots are breaking through the pot, the plant is probably getting too crowded, and it won’t produce flowers as well.
Some people repot every year. Others do it every other year.
If the lily is planted directly in a plant pocket, we simply wait until it starts growing where we don’t want it to and trim it back.
Rock Size and Planting
Audience Question:
Does rock size matter?
When you ask about rock size, the first thing I think of is the large boulders we use around the perimeter.
We use big boulders so you can walk and move around on them without them shifting.
For the plants, we use smaller gravel as a top dressing.
If you have lilies in pots and want to hide them in the gravel, we recommend taking them out of the plastic pot and putting them into a fabric pot.
Some of our fabric pots have a drawstring closure at the top that helps contain the soil.
Then you can top the pot with three-quarter-inch gravel or similar material.
If you have large koi that are destroying your plants, you can also put some larger rocks around the plant to protect it.
Pond Lighting
Once the pond is drained, spring is also a great time to check your lights or install new lighting.
Our lighting systems start with a transformer, and the lights plug into the transformer.
This is a 60-watt transformer, and this is a one-watt light, so you could theoretically put 60 of these lights on this system.
As you size your system, it’s a very simple calculation.
The transformer has a photocell that turns the lights on when it gets dark. It also has a timer that can turn them off after two, three, four hours, or whatever you choose.
We have traditional white lights as well as color-changing lighting systems.
There are some really cool options.
Feeding Fish in the Spring
Now we’re going to fill the pond back up, get the waterfall running, and we’re good to go.
The fish have a nice, clean, happy home.
So, are we ready to start feeding them?
Anybody know the magic temperature?
Around 50–55 degrees.
Above 50 degrees, their metabolism starts speeding up. Below 50 degrees, they slow down.
In winter, koi don’t technically hibernate. They enter a state called torpor, which is similar to hibernation.
They stop eating because they don’t need the food. They’re not moving around much.
If they get hungry, they can eat microorganisms and other food sources naturally present in the pond.
Having a thermometer in your pond is especially important this time of year.
We have basic thermometers and fancy Wi-Fi thermometers that let you monitor the temperature from your phone.
Once the pond is consistently above about 55 degrees, we can start feeding slowly.
I fed the fish here this morning, and they ate voraciously. It was fun to see everybody again after winter.
Spring vs. Summer Fish Food
Right now, we’re feeding a cold-water food.
The difference between cold-water food and summer food is digestibility.
This time of year, the temperatures can swing dramatically. One day it can be 90 degrees, and the next day it can be 20.
If food sits in a fish’s digestive system during those temperature swings, it can potentially cause problems.
Cold-water food is designed to be easily digested and processed quickly.
In the summer, we want to give the fish as many nutrients as possible, so we switch to a higher-protein food.
If you look at our fish food labels, you’ll see the protein content.
Our summer foods have a higher protein content and also include ingredients that help enhance fish coloration.
So, think:
- Spring: Cold-water food.
- Summer: Higher-protein summer food.
- Around 60 degrees consistently: Transition to summer food, which will probably be around May.
Koi Crunchies
Anybody ever use koi crunchies?
I love koi crunchies.
They’re easily digestible and process quickly in the fish’s digestive system.
They’re also high in vitamin C.
In our fall class, I always tell people to get koi crunchies into their fish before winter because it’s a good way to provide extra nutrients going into the colder months.
Spring Fish Health
This time of year, everything is waking up.
Your fish are waking up.
Your plants are waking up.
But so are the pathogens in the pond.
Bacteria and other organisms that can affect fish are becoming active again.
We want to keep the fish healthy enough to fight off those infections.
If you’ve noticed fish health problems during the spring, one thing we really like is probiotic food.
It’s easily digestible and helps support the fish’s immune system from the inside out.
Pond Salt
Anybody use pond salt?
We keep pond salt on the shelf if it’s needed.
Pond salt can help with many of the pathogens that affect koi and goldfish.
If you start seeing problems this time of year, pond salt can be a good treatment.
However, if you maintain a high level of salt in the pond all the time, then if your fish develop a problem, you may need something stronger.
So we recommend not using salt unless you actually need it.
If you have fish health problems, let us know.
We have microscopes and diagnostic tools that allow us to examine fish for disease and help get them back to health.
Vacation Feeding
Audience Question:
What should I do if I’m going on vacation for several days? Do I need someone to feed the fish?
For the most part, your pond fish are fine without food for a week.
They’re probably some of the easiest pets you’ll ever own.
There are exceptions. Our retail fish tanks are very sterile environments, and fish in those tanks might start showing health issues after going a week without food, especially larger fish.
Your ecosystem pond is different.
The fish are naturally finding things to eat—microplankton, nematodes, rotifers, and other organisms.
They’ll probably be perfectly fine.
In fact, some customers tell me they’ve never fed their fish in 30 years.
But to me, feeding fish is half the joy of owning a pond.
When I walk past my pond to feed my fish, they come racing across the pond to see me.
They recognize you.
They recognize your voice.
That interaction is one of the best parts of owning a pond.
If you have a large koi collection, those fish do need regular food. But even then, going a week without eating generally isn’t a problem.
Feeding Other Foods
Anybody ever feed watermelon to their fish?
Watermelon is a fun summertime treat.
Anything with vitamin C can be interesting.
If I’m sitting on my patio eating an orange, I might throw some of the orange peel or flesh into the pond.
I’ve also seen people put an entire slice of watermelon in the pond and let the larger koi destroy it.
It’s a fun summertime option.
Rebuilding the Ecosystem After a Cleanout
After a cleanout, we have to get the ecosystem going again.
When we clean the pond, we’re doing something good by removing muck and debris, but we’ve also disrupted the ecosystem.
Some people in the industry historically used pressure washers to scrub every rock in the pond.
I think that’s a mistake.
You’re destroying the ecosystem.
That green fuzz on the rocks is going to come back anyway.
We don’t want to scrub the rocks completely clean.
We want to leave some of that biofilm because that’s what helps kick-start the ecosystem again.
We’ve rinsed the bio-balls and BOF filter during the annual cleaning, so we’re essentially starting over.
That’s why this time of year is a good time to add cold-water beneficial bacteria.
Just like the cold-water fish food, it’s specially formulated for slower growth and colder water.
Adding beneficial bacteria after the cleanout helps rebuild the ecosystem.
Water Changes and Pond Detox
When we’re doing a 30% or 50% water change, remember that if you’re on city water, you have chlorine and chloramines.
Don’t forget your pond detox.
Just a few drops of detox can remove chlorine and chloramine almost instantly.
If there’s anything more poisonous to fish than ammonia, it’s chlorine.
We drink chlorinated water all day long, but fish can die when exposed to it.
All of our water treatments use a dosage rate based on gallons.
The formula for determining pond volume is:
Length × Width × Average Depth × 7.48 = Gallons
For chlorine detox, we recommend doubling the normal dosage.
Your local water company may increase chlorine levels from time to time. It doesn’t necessarily affect us, but it can make a huge difference when you have fish.
So, double the dosage.
Don’t triple it.
Just double it.
And always keep a bottle of detox on hand.
If you’ve owned a pond long enough, you’ve probably left your garden hose running.
You go to church, come home, and realize, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to turn the hose off.”
Then you look outside and your fish are gasping at the surface.
Pond detox can instantly dechlorinate the water and potentially save your fish.
I’ve done it more than once!
Automatic Dosing Systems
How many people have a dosing system?
The dosing system automatically adds beneficial bacteria to your pond.
We used to tell people to manually add Maintain or Clear once a week during the summer.
Over the past five years, since we started using dosing systems, we’ve found that the dosing system makes the process much easier.
It automatically adds a small amount on a consistent basis.
You’ll see it drip approximately once a minute.
The consistency makes a huge difference.
If you look around at our ponds, you’ll see crystal-clear water and happy, healthy fish.
The dosing system is one of the things that helps make that possible.
High Nitrates in Source Water
Audience Question:
My source water is already very high in nitrates. How can I mitigate that?
We actually use well water here for our fish tanks, so we monitor it closely.
In our fish tanks, we constantly have water hyacinth and water lettuce that we swap in and out.
The best way to remove nitrates naturally is plants, plants, plants.
If there’s a way to pre-filter your water using plants or another method to reduce nitrates before the water enters the pond, that would help.
High nitrates aren’t necessarily the end of the world.
They can exacerbate some koi health issues, but fish can survive in water with elevated nitrates.
The same is true with pH.
We have customers with a pH of 8.5 whose fish are perfectly happy, and others with a pH below 7 whose fish are perfectly happy.
What we don’t want is a dramatic change.
Going from 8.5 to 8 overnight is a problem.
Fish adapt to a consistent environment.
That’s one of the benefits of a dosing system: it helps maintain consistency.
Maintain vs. Clear
Audience Question:
What’s the difference between Maintain and Clear?
After about five years of experimenting with these products, we overwhelmingly recommend Clear over Maintain for most ponds.
If you have pea-soup-green water, Maintain is your friend.
It’s fantastic for clearing up green water quickly.
However, if you use too much Maintain, you can end up with an overabundance of stringy, fuzzy algae.
It’s very concentrated, and most ponds don’t need that much of it unless they have an extremely heavy fish load.
Clear, on the other hand, contains just enough of the ingredients needed to maintain crystal-clear water, along with additional ingredients that help reduce string algae.
For most pond owners, string algae is the bigger problem, not green water.
That’s why Clear is usually what we recommend.
On larger dosing systems, you can actually use two different treatments.
You can put one bottle of each into the doser and adjust the ratio with your phone.
If you have more string algae, you can increase Clear and decrease Maintain.
For dosing systems, keep the setting at one—the lowest setting—unless you need more.
If you need more, increase it slightly, then turn it back down.
A bottle can last an entire year when the doser is kept at the lowest setting.
Cloudy Water After Using Clear
Audience Question:
Why does Clear sometimes turn the water white for a little while?
I haven’t noticed that very often.
Are you using a doser or manually adding it?
Audience:
Manually adding it.
It may be that you’re slightly overdosing it.
The formula used in the dosing system is different because it’s super-concentrated and designed to be added one small drip at a time.
If the water becomes slightly milky but clears back up by the next morning and the fish are acting normally, that’s encouraging.
I haven’t personally experimented much with that particular situation, but it’s interesting.
Spring String Algae
Audience Question:
Have you noticed that spring algae seems particularly bad this year?
Honestly, my head has been behind my computer designing things, so I haven’t paid much attention!
I know our habitat pond has some string algae, and there’s some in one of our swim pond filters.
How about everybody else?
Are you seeing more or less string algae this year?
Audience:
More.
Interesting.
Every pond is different, and that’s what makes this industry so much fun.
Every year is different.
You have your daytime pond, your evening pond, and everything else—and every year brings something different.
Why Is String Algae Worse in Winter and Early Spring?
We commonly see the heaviest string algae from February through April.
By the end of April, your plants start growing.
The pond begins waking up.
By June and July, string algae should be significantly reduced if you have enough plants.
What Should You Do About String Algae?
We actually have an entire brochure about string algae.
So, what do you do?
Plants, plants, plants!
That’s always my first answer.
Barley
Anybody ever tried barley for string algae?
Some people swear by it.
Other people say it doesn’t work at all.
Barley has an interesting history.
We used to sell actual barley bales that people would throw into their ponds.
The problem is that you’re adding organic material to the pond, which can break down and add nutrients.
Barley extract is different.
It creates a condition that string algae doesn’t like. It’s somewhat related to the same concept as hydrogen peroxide.
Some people love it.
Others don’t see much of an effect.
It’s one of those things worth experimenting with to see how your pond responds.
SAB
If you’re saying, “Mark, I have no more room for plants, and my friends are coming over in two weeks. I need this string algae gone,” you can use SAB.
SAB is a powder that you sprinkle directly onto string algae.
It damages the algae cells, which then break apart and get pulled into the skimmer.
As a polishing treatment, SAB can definitely be useful.
My Order of Attack
For me, I would approach string algae in this order:
- Plants
- Physical removal
- Barley
- SAB
We also have algaecide on the shelf.
Don’t buy algaecide.
You don’t need it, and you can kill your fish with it.
Algaecide is essentially a swimming-pool chemical and shouldn’t be used casually in ponds.
We sell it because people don’t always listen to me!
Final Questions
Audience Question:
What types of fish do you sell?
We sell koi and a couple of different kinds of goldfish.
We also have a couple of tanks with bass, bluegills, minnows, and shubunkins.
We primarily sell pond fish.
Our habitat pond is stocked with those types of fish rather than koi and goldfish.
Audience Question:
Do you carry replacement parts for this filter?
Yes.
Check with the people in the store, and they’ll be able to help you get the replacement parts.
Closing
Well, I’m three minutes over!
Any final questions?
Thank you all very much for coming.
Spread the word, and check out our calendar of events. It’s huge.
Enjoy!