Pond Maintenance

Pond Maintenance

Plants and fish are going to depend on your maintenance of the water garden. If you were to build a water garden and never perform any type of maintenance, your fish, and plants will not be healthy and thrive, as you would expect. Of course, some plants are going to be very hardy and they will take over the pond. Those that are fast spreading will choke most other plants out. The fish are going to try to survive in the water that is murky and contaminated.

The water becomes polluted with disease and brings death of the fish and plants. A balanced environment in the water garden is what you have to achieve. Maintenance of the water garden is only a few hours a month, less than what you spend in weeding and maintaining many of your other gardens.

The balanced environment in the water garden needs less maintenance than a water garden that is not. The plants in the water garden act as natural filters for the waste from the fish. Too little plants and the environment are not balanced. Too many plants and the water are not balanced. Too many fish in the water garden are difficult to balance no matter how many plants you add to the water garden.

To balance the water garden as much as possible, to limit your maintenance needed, practice planting about one third of the water garden with plants that are going to clean the water. To clean the water, the plants need to be in the water, not just in the moist soil surrounding the water garden. The plants in the water garden control the amount of ammonia and nitrates that are in the water garden.

One thing about the fish in the water garden is some types of fish do like to eat or dig at the plants that are in the water garden. If you are raising fish that continually are digging at or eating the plants in the water garden, you can put some type of under water barrier so that the fish cannot reach the plants. The water should still be able to move through this barrier, but the fish cannot.

If you are unable to put some type of barrier between the fish and the plants, you will need to install some type of filtration system. Not all water gardens will need a filtration system if it is balanced between the fish and the plants. Raising Koi fish, they often are known to dig at the plants in the water garden. If you are on a strict budget, Goldfish might be the better choice for your water garden so that you aren’t faced with additional problems of the Koi digging at plants so that the water garden is balanced.