Do you have a garden pond? Or would you like one? A garden pond or a water garden does not have to be large to completely change how you use your garden. The sound of running water is so relaxing and a pond fountain or a waterfall can have a cooling effect on a hot summer’s day. Watching the fish carry out their daily lives is relaxing too and many gardeners like the chance to branch out into the new kingdom of aquatic plants.

If your pond is sunk into the earth, your could watch it from above or you could build it above ground and utilize perspex windows to watch your fish on their own level. Your fish will breed too, so you will have a new, perfect, ecosystem in your own garden.

Choose the location of your pond with care. Try to put it on slightly higher ground, so that it is not flooded with all your garden’s rainwater in the course of heavy rains. Be wary of putting your pond under a tree or you will forever be raking leaves out of the water, which is a real nuisance. Putting your pond in a location where it is in at least partial shade when the sun is high will also help reduce on algae growth.

However, once the builder has created your pond and you have stocked it, is the time when your work begins. Maybe not work, possibly you will enjoy maintaining your fish and your fish pond. This is not difficult and a largish pond will need scarcely any maintenance at all, most of it can be mechanized.

One of the first things that you will have to try to do is stop your garden falling into the pond. You do not want surrounding mud slipping into the pond and literally muddying the water. This can be achieved by lining your pond with a butyl pond liner and bringing the liner up over the lip of the pond by a foot or two.

Then you have to hold that in place. This can be done to suit your taste, but many people put a stone or brick walkway around the pond. If you let this overhang the pond by an inch or two, you will very nearly totally hide the pond liner.

The majority of people overfeed their fish, because fish outdoor will find a lot of natural food such as flies, larvae and grubs. This surplus food turns into a surplus of nutrients. This super-charged water is a perfect environment for algae, and algae is going to be your undying adversary. However, you can soak up some of these surplus nutrients with other plants that you like.

Aquatic plants such as lilies really make a pond and they will help aerate the water during the day when the water may be warmer (warm water contains less oxygen than cool water). Plants also give your fish somewhere to hide from predators and strong sunlight, which will diminish stress on your fish as well.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is now involved with water garden pumps. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for a special deal.

The primary priority of any koi pond keeper, indeed of any fish pond keeper, it to preserve the pond water at a high level of cleanliness. This basically means that you have to keep the nitrate and ammonia levels down. However, the fish will not help in this endeavour, and nor can they, since they live and defecate in their environment, the water. You can accurately say that the live in their own toilet bowl.

Therefore, it is up to you, as their patron, to keep their water as clean as possible. This is actually not so difficult and much or the cleansing process can be automated, leaving you, the owner, to only have to carry out routine, weekly checks.

The first check that you should carry out can be made on a daily basis if not more frequently, when you feed your fish, does the water look clear? Is it green? Are there lots of leaves floating around in it? If it is translucent enough to see the bottom of the pond, you are probably doing OK, but do not rely on that, wait for the weekly chemical check up.

Never forget that you have manufactured an unnatural environment for your fish to live in. It is nearer to nature that a fish tank, but it is a long way from being a river or a lake. This is why the bigger your pond is, the easier it will be to maintain, because the closer it will be to the real thing.

The smaller your pond, the more that you will have to rely on water filtration and aeration systems to keep the water crystal clear. One way of helping to maintain clear water is not to over feed. Most fish pond owners give far more fish food that the fish require.

This results in more faeces and more rotting food on the bottom of the pond. All this excess energy in the water is happily used up by algae, which will also suck the oxygen out of the water as it blooms. If you find yourself in this situation, the first thing to do is reduce the amount of feed and clean the sides of the pond of algae. If you do not, the lack of oxygen will stress out your fish and stressed fish are more susceptible to disease.

Keep the water in your pond circulating as much as possible, as this will reintroduce oxygen into the water that the fish, algae and plants have used up. The standard ways of doing this are to have a fountain, a waterfall and an aerator (or bubbler, like you see in fish tanks).

Another way of dealing with oxygen and algae issues is to not overstock your fish pond. Koi will breed readily, so if you just start your population off with a few fish, you will soon have many more. They know when there are too many of them and they will eat the young or control the breeding in other ways. If you do all you can to give your fish a good milieu, they will do the rest.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is at present involved with fish pond accessories. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for some great deals.

Do you like the sound of running water? Do you find the sound relaxing? Well, you can easily produce the sound of moving water in your own garden. You can put in a fish pond or a water garden. So, if you think that your garden needs landscaping, it might be a good idea to think about a fish pond or water garden.

People think that a fish pond takes lot of looking after, but that is not inevitably the case. The fact is that the larger the fish pond, the less effort you have to put into it. This is because a large pond can create its own ecosystem, whereas a small fish pond requires help.

The ways that you can help a small fish pond be a decent environment for your fish are as follows:

Pond Filters – use a pond filter with a good pump. Do not forget that you could get a solar powered pump. It will save on the environment and on your wallet. You should use a pond filter on a small pond, because the ecosystem cannot deal with all the plant waste of a small ornamental pond on its own. A pond pump will supply the filtration system and a waterfall or fountain if you wish.

Your pond filtration system should be left running twenty-four hours a day, but you can not just set it and forget it. Check that the pump is running daily and keep the filter as clean as needed for it to do its job. You may find that you have to clean it two or three times a week in the summer and autumn but only once a week in the winter and spring.

Leaf Netting: stop leaves from clogging up your pond in the autumn. The net should be suspended a foot or so above the pond to stop autumn leaves falling into the water and rotting.

Feeding: all fish should be given fish food, not bread or scraps. Some fish need specific fish food in order to maintain their colour. When you buy your fish, the salesperson should inform you what they eat. In general, the larger the pond the less hassle feeding becomes as they will eat natural food like insects, grubs, larvae and flies.

Fish need less food in the winter when they become semi-dormant and live off the fat reserves that they built up in the warmer months, so give food often in the summer and autumn, but less often in the winter. You must look to see if surplus food is left floating on the surface.

Winter: make sure that there is a hole in the ice so that the water can take in oxygen and the fish can feed if they wish to. You can buy a floating de-icer or some people float a round football in a hoola-hoop, which seems to work unless the temperature gets very low.

In fact, the hoola-hoop is a good idea all year round really. If you place the food in the hoop, it remains in one place and you can see if you have given too much. It also makes a nice site to see all the fish feeding in a shoal.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently concerned with water garden pumps. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site right away for some extra special deals.