
Before You Start Your Project Always check with your power company before you dig your pond. Wires can be buried in unexpected places in your yard. Power companies will come to your house for free and mark where they have buried wires. Don't dig until you are sure there are no wires buried where you want your pond. How to figure gallons of water in your pond: Gallons are figured like this: length x width x depth x 7.5 gallons per cubic foot. The proper pump moves half the water every hour, so knowing how many gallons you have leads you to the right pump. Larger pumps than necessary are great because they push more water over the waterfall. Using a cast iron sugar kettle as a gold fish pond is not a good idea. Sugar kettles are almost impossible to move. They can be found relatively easily....a newspaper ad, maybe, but moving it would require a moving truck and maybe a machine like a pallet jack or fork lift to get it from the ground to the truck. And then again when you get it home. There are fiberglass knock offs of sugar kettles. You can hardly tell the difference. Chances are you could find one online. They don't rust, don't need repainting every few years, and have a shelf for plants. A skimmer is a container mounted usually underground and mounted just at water level. They usually contain both a pump and filter media. The purpose of it is to suck leaves, right into skimmer instead of letting them settle to the bottom of your pond. They also provide water level safety not letting the pump pump all the water out of the pond if there is a waterfall problem, because they are up from the bottom by 2 ' inside the skimmer. This can lower daily pond maintenance down to weekly cleaning. 10 Essential Pond Building Tips • You must have one bunch of anacharis (underwater grass) per square foot of water surface area. This serves as a natural filter and as food for the fish. It grows faster than the fish can eat it. • 50 - 60% of the surface of the water must be shaded with floating plants. Water lilies are great, as are water hyacinths, water lettuce or water poppies. Just be sure to compost them as they multiply and not allow them loose in a natural waterway. • You must have fish to complete the balanced ecosystem. I recommend common goldfish. Do not put Koi in your pond unless you have built a koi pond. They will eat all of your plants. • Do not feed your fish. They will become too big for the pond and upset the ecosystem. You will have an overpopulation problem and all of your fish will die. • Put in one linear foot of fish for each 25 square feet of pond surface area. If you have 100 square feet of pond, you may have 4 foot long fish, 8 six inch fish or 16 three inch fish and so on. • Do not allow turtles, crawfish, alligators, ducks, geese, dogs, raccoons, possums, muskrats, nutria or your children to swim in your pond. • Do not use chemicals!!! EVER! Add a dechlorinator when you first fill the pond and then when you add more than 10% water afterwards. • Do not worry about pH. It will take care of itself. • Remove any dead or decaying vegetation regularly so that ammonia does not build up and foul your pond. • Relax. Your pond will generally take care of itself. I recommend benevolent neglect as the best approach to pondkeeping. Do not even try to seam large pieces of EPDM or butyl rubber liner together at home. It won't work. If you need an extra large piece, the factory will seam it for you, usually for free or very little money. Cover Your Liner Always cover your liner with rocks or water. Liner exposed to the sun can incur damage quickly. Rubber or EPDM liner lasts much longer. Exposed plastic liner, either flexible or a preformed shell will crack in a short time and it cannot be repaired. When you are buying hose clamps, don't buy the cheap ones...they rust and fall apart. Buy the more expensive steel ones. They will last forever. Same with plastic hose fittings. Buy brass hose fittings. Building Above Grade If you do nothing else while building your pond, build it above grade. You can use my method or just pile up the soil you removed from the hole around the edges, but if you don't build it up, run off from your yard can kill your pond. When you are digging your hole, dig straight down. If you dig a bowl shape you will slide down into the water every time you try to get in your pond to do maintenance. To find out the square footage of your pond, multiply the length times the width. If your pond is not a rectangle, make your best guess as to length and width. If your pond is round, multiply the radius squared times 3.14 (pi). That will give you the square footage. Remember thinking you would never need high school geometry? Wrong. Selecting pond equipment When selecting equipment, you should seriously consider the cost of operation. Each amp can cost $103 per year based on a dime per kilowatt hour. What does your local utility charge per KwH. You can look on your bill and find out. Most of your cost comes from running your pump, so be sure to choose the right one. Other costs can be from lighting and bubblers. If you choose the right equipment you can keep your electricity costs down. Consider solar pumps or lights. When choosing the best pump for your pond, calculate your head loss. Head loss is the vertical distance the pump has to push the water plus the friction caused by the water flowing through the pipes and fittings. If the flow rate is too high for the pipe's diameter, you create more pressure. Head losses also happen when filters clog with debris and create back pressure; this can be eased by keeping your filter clean. Too many elbows can add to back pressure. Pumping vertically, whether it is to a waterfall or a filter, will also increase head pressure. Running costs increase with head loss, so it is important to keep head loss to a minimum. If you have a choice, always choose pumps, lights and other accessories that you plug in yourself to an outlet near your pond. If a pump or light is hardwired in by an electrician, you must call an electrician when your pump or light needs replacing. When you have electrical outlets installed for your pond, always have GFCI's (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters) installed. These will instantly cut off your electricity if the outlet gets wet. Give Koi Quartered Oranges Give your koi quartered oranges to nibble on. They love them and it gives them vitamin C. They also love red cabbage. Leave it whole and watch them play with it like a volleyball. Goldfish Eggs There is no set time for goldfish eggs to hatch. The warmer the water, the faster they hatch, so don't worry if some take longer than others. Goldfish are born blackish, brownish gray and gradually change to orange, gold or other adult colors. They are born dark to escape the parents who will have them for breakfast if given the chance. Not all of them change; some stay the same brownish, blackish color all their lives. Koi Eating Out of Your Hand You can tame koi to eat out of your hand more easily if you crouch down low. Have food in your hand and put your hand in the water. Let the food out of your hand slowly. Do this for a few weeks and they will eat from your hand readily. Do not forget that if koi come to your hand to eat, they will also come to the egret or heron who has come for a fresh koi dinner. Fish Fighting If you see your fish chasing each other like they are fighting, don't worry, they are not fighting. What you see is fish spawning. You are about have fish eggs, then babies. Trapping Wildlife USED If you trap visiting wildlife like raccoons, and want to relocate them, check with the Wildlife Commission to see if (1) you have rights to move them to a more suited environment, (2) if they are prone to mark their territory and return, (3) have the local humane society trap & move them to a more fitting area. If they are taken to a brand new neighborhood, they are likely to be unable to find food and die. Fish Feeding Do not feed goldfish because it turns the pond into an outdoor aquarium, but here's yet another reason not to feed them. Fish soon realize that when a shape appears at the edge of the pond, food appears. They like that and soon they are trained to eat out of your hand. At least that is what you think. Fish are not the brightest of critters, so when ANY shape appears at the edge of your pond, like a heron, an egret, a crane or a raccoon, they come up to greet the intruder and oops, they become a fresh sushi dinner for a hungry intruder. Bird Bathing When you build your pond, make one end very shallow, 3 to 5 inches deep. Put some small pebbles at the bottom and larger rocks around the sides. That allows your bird buddies a place to drink and bathe. If you put plants in there, you will also have a natural bog filter for your pond. Your bird friends will thank you, especially in the winter when water is hard to find. How do I get rid of a snake? Depends on how afraid of him you are. You can use a large fish net, catch him and he will get tangled up in it. You can then relocate him where he will be comfortable. Or you can call an exterminator and he will take care of it. Most snakes are much more afraid of you than you are of them. Unless you have small children, I suggest just not disturbing your snake. Koi illegal? Owning or keeping koi is illegal in the state of Maine. Koi are considered a nuisance fish that can invade public waterways and cause native fish to die out. No matter what state you live in, check with your local extension service to find out the status of koi. Catching Fish During cold weather, if you have to catch a fish to medicate it rather than medicate the entire pond, pour some warm water in the pond and the fish will come to it. Have your net ready. Sick fish As with many animals, when a fish is diseased the other fish will attack and kill it. If you see a sick fish, remove it as soon as you see it. There is a chance you can save it and also not have it infect the other fis Lethargic Fish When your night time temps dip below 55 degreesF, you fish will begin hanging out at the bottom of the pond. Don't worry. It's what they do in preparation for their upcoming cold weather protection. Fish hiding places In the fall, floating plants get smaller and offer no real place for fish to hide from predators. Put a flat rock over two chunky rocks or put clay pots on their sides in the bottom of your pond so your fish have places to hide. You can also buy 'castles' commercially as hiding places. Fall Fish Feeding When temperatures get below 60 degrees F, if you feed your fish at all, start feeding them only 2 or 3 times a week. Their metabolism slows and they cannot digest food quickly. When the temps drop below 55 degrees F, stop feeding them altogether. Dealing with Raccoons If you have problems with raccoons, be aware that trying to relocate them after trapping is dangerous and usually illegal. Please call your local SPCA to deal with raccoons. Foul Water The most common reason for foul water in the pond is run off from surrounding areas. Build your pond about 4" above the ground to avoid this problem before it starts. Pest Control Aphids and many other garden pests can be easily controlled with an inexpensive, homemade insecticide--according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Mix one tablespoon of dishwashing detergent with one cup of cooking oil. When pests strike, mix one to two and one half teaspoons of the detergent oil mix with one cup of water. The detergent causes the oil to emulsify in the water. It can be sprayed on the water lilies every ten days. Besides aphids, the mixture works against whiteflies and spider mites. It will not harm fish. Chemicals Chemicals kill! Insecticides, pesticides all kill your plants and fish, even sprayed on the other side of your yard or by your neighbors. Scraping and sanding your house prior to painting will allow particles in your pond that will kill everything. Run off from your lawn or a street or driveway will kill your plants and fish. Remember, chemicals will kill your pond. Aquarium Charcoal If you see charcoal mentioned to clean your water or to add to your filter, it means aquarium charcoal , NOT charcoal briquets that you barbeque with. Scare Away Predators To scare away predators like herons, egrets, muskrats, raccoons, etc, who think your pond is an all-you-can-eat buffet, get a motion activated sensor that sprays a jet of water when motion is detected. Be careful to turn it off if you are the one heading toward the pond or you will get real wet. Burrowing Pests If you live where you are bothered by gophers or rats, put chicken wire under your pond liner before the underlayment and the liner. That will keep the burrowing pests from eating a hole through your liner. Aeration When the weather is very hot, consider adding more aeration to your pond. Heat depletes oxygen when fish need it most. You could add another pump or bubbler. Some of you run your pumps on timers so they are off at night. Leave them running 24 hours until the heat emergency is over. Filtration Most pond pumps need a prefilter to keep the small debris out of the pump's impeller. If yours doesn't have one, you have already figured that out. If you have a balanced ecosystem, that's all you need. You do not need an expensive biofiltration system, UV lights or any of that. However, if you feed those fishies, you must have a filtration system. It might be a simple as putting the pump in a container full of lava rock or as elaborate as an outside-the-pond biofilter with a UV light so all water is pumped through the filter and under the UV light so the water is almost sterilized. They are very pricey, but they do work and the pond stays crystal clear. Biofilter cleaning If you have a biofilter with your pond, clean it well only once a year. A biofilter's job is to grow beneficial bacteria. If you clean the filter, you kill the bacteria. After you clean it, add a starter dose of beneficial bacteria before starting to use it again. Pump Costs If you want to know how much it costs you to run your pond pump, here's the formula to find out: Amps x volts divided by 1000 x KWH cost x 24 hours-a-day x 30.4 days- per-month = cost per month. Algae Blooms If you have an algae bloom, do not give into the temptation to pump out the water and start over. You will just have another algae bloom within 3 or 4 days. Put more submerged vegetation in the pond and make sure at least half the pond is covered by floating vegetation. To restore the ecosystem, use a bacteria jump start solution either in your biofilter or directly into your pond water. Changing Water Your pond and your veggie garden will benefit if you pump 10% of your pond water into your vegetable garden each week. It's the best fertilizer in the world. And refreshing pond water weekly keeps the water from fouling as easily. Temperature Inversion Continuous hot weather causes your pond water to heat and cause a temperature inversion. The cool water on the bottom and all the organic matter and fish waste floats to the top. It uses up available oxygen and your fish all die. Keep organic matter and debris from collecting on your pond bottom. Keep your fish alive in hot weather. Tea Colored Water? If you pond is under an oak tree, the water will turn a tea color from the tannin in the leaves. The only way I know to take the tea color out is to use activated charcoal - not briquettes. Put some activated charcoal in a bag of some sort...old panty hose legs are great and put the bag in your filter. It works. Not forever, but it works. Your UV Light in Winter If you live where the temps drop below 40 degrees F in the winter and use a UV light, you can remove it until the weather warms again. Algae die off in the winter plus you can save electricity if your UV is not running. Be careful, those bulbs are fragile. And expensive. Troubleshooting If your pump stops pumping, touch it to see if it is running. If it is check hoses and check to see if something is stuck in the pump. If it is not running, check your GFCI outlet. You do have one, don't you? If not, get one. If so, push the button to reactivate the circuit. If it does not come back on, you probably have a defective pump. If the circuit continues to break, let it dry out and try it again. Submersible pumps have a safety switch built in that turns the pump off when it gets too hot. Intermittent starting and stopping means your pump is getting too hot, shutting itself off and when it cools, it is starting again. Soon your pump will stop altogether having burned out. Start planning for a new pump as soons as your pump begins its intermittent behavior. Debris Removal Be very careful to remove all debris from your pond before winter arrives. You may want to consider putting netting over your pond to catch leaves. You can used nylon net and make your own or buy special leaf netting from your aquatic nursery or online. Water Lilies Water lilies must have a minimum of five hours of direct sunlight daily in order to bloom heavily; the more sun, the better Fertilize your water lilies at least once monthly. They would prefer twice a month. There are several brands of lily fertilizer and they are all OK. Water lily flowers open each morning and close each night unless they are night bloomers which do the opposite. The flowers live about three days and die. Pick it off at the base when it dies. As the pads yellow and die, pick those off at the base as well. The outer ring of pads dies first. Place your water lily pot as deep as you can in your pond. They like to have the top of their pots at least 6" below the water surface. I put them at the bottom of the pond....at least 18" below the surface. Pot up water lilies in wide, shallow containers rather than thin and deep ones. Dish pans are good, but they really would like to have a perforated pot, so water can flow through the soil. If you have a natural bottom pond and plant a hardy water lily in the bottom, soon you will have a pond covered with water lilies, choked with water lilies. There is no way to remove them except to rake them out. And they will return in the spring. Planting them in pots does delay the take-over for a few months, but they will take over. And you will be writing to me asking how to kill them. Remember you put them there and watched them grow. Impatiens? You can grow impatiens stuck between the rocks around the top of the pond with just their roots in the pond water. They must be in the shade. Water loving house plants can grow the same way. Most of these plants will not survive a winter. Tadpoles Do your water lily pads look smaller? Do you see serrations around the edges? Often tadpoles will snack on the edges of water lily pads. Don't worry, the tadpoles will be gone soon and the lily will make more pads. Pond Plants Goldfish and koi love hyacinth roots and will eat them causing the hyacinth to stop its filtering action in your pond. If you don't already have too many hyacinths and want to save the ones you have, isolate some of them where the fish can't reach. You can even move them to a bucket of water for a week or so until the roots regrow. If you plant several different water lilies in one pot, you will get several different colors when they bloom for a wonderful display in the pond. Just remember to to divide them in the spring and repot if they are crowded. Acorus is a sweet flag, invasive as hyacinths. It grows naturally along banks of any water, maybe a mud puddle if the puddle is there long enough. I keep it potted up in the pond to keep it under control. When starts jumping out of its pot, just whack off all the stems coming from every hole in the pot. If you don't watch out, it will break the pot in its haste to get free. Acorus gets scale...all the time. Here's what I do. I cut the acorus back to about 1" tall and suberged the pot, plant and all. When it comes back up out of the water, the scale is gone, drowned. If your water lilies are two or three years old, and are producing lots of leaves, but few blooms, they probably need dividing. Just unpot them, break into pieces, repot thepieces with the largest root systems. Feed only May through October and be sure to let the plants go through dormancy during the winter, warm though it might be Did you know you can pick water lily blooms and use them as cut flowers in the house. They last a few days and smell heavenly. August is a great time to cut back and repot your pond plants. It will be warm enough for them to set roots before cold weather arrives. There are special potting mixes made for potting pond plants, but I use a clay soil with very little organic matter in it. If you have many water lilies in your pond, you may want to stagger the fertilizing schedule. When you fertilize them, you are feeding algae as well. Not feeding them all at once will keep algae growth down. If you gather plants from the wild, you will bring in parasites and diseases. If you must harvest from the roadsides and swamps, first of all, be careful. Secondly check local laws, it may be illegal. Third, put your plants in a washtub or bucket of water with a cup of so of clorox in it. Leave them there for a week to ten days. That will kill any parasites or other bugs that may have found their way home with you. When the weather cools and the days shorten, stop feeding your water lilies and allow them to go dormant. Usually September or October is the time to stop depending on where you live. If you have not yet cut back your Louisiana irises, cyperus or papyrus, do so in September so new growth can start freely in the spring. Water lilies begin dormancy in September. Their leaves get smaller and smaller and they stop blooming. Don't worry. They are reacting to shorter periods of daylight. Stop fertilizing the lilies in mid October in the South. By starving the plants at the end of the season, they will form some small, hard and durable tubers which survive the dormant period better than the large fleshy root of the main plant. This, along with dropping the water lily to the bottom of your pond will give you a better chance of your lilies coming back in the spring. Trees Did you know it takes at least two average sized trees under optimal conditions to provide enough oxygen for one human? Have you planted your two trees yet? Bamboo, Banana Trees The new growth of bamboo and banana trees can poke through your pond liner. Do not plant either one close to your pond. And as invasive as both are, I would use neither in the landscape where your pond is. Covering the Pond Bottom No matter what you read, do not cover the bottom of your pond with sand and plant water lilies in it. Water lilies are nothing but pretty weeds and are very invasive. Soon you will have a mat of water lilies covering your pond and have to remove them and the now filthy sand as well. Keep your water lilies potted.

Before You Start Your Project

Always check with your power company before you dig your pond. Wires can be buried in unexpected places in your yard. Power companies will come to your house for free and mark where they have buried wires. Don't dig until you are sure there are no wires buried where you want your pond.

How to figure gallons of water in your pond:

Gallons are figured like this: length x width x depth x 7.5 gallons per cubic foot. The proper pump moves half the water every hour, so knowing how many gallons you have leads you to the right pump. Larger pumps than necessary are great because they push more water over the waterfall.

Using a cast iron sugar kettle as a gold fish pond is not a good idea.

Sugar kettles are almost impossible to move. They can be found relatively easily....a newspaper ad, maybe, but moving it would require a moving truck and maybe a machine like a pallet jack or fork lift to get it from the ground to the truck. And then again when you get it home.

There are fiberglass knock offs of sugar kettles. You can hardly tell the difference. Chances are you could find one online. They don't rust, don't need repainting every few years, and have a shelf for plants.

A skimmer is a container mounted usually underground and mounted just at water level. They usually contain both a pump and filter media. The purpose of it is to suck leaves, right into skimmer instead of letting them settle to the bottom of your pond.

They also provide water level safety not letting the pump pump all the water out of the pond if there is a waterfall problem, because they are up from the bottom by 2 ' inside the skimmer. This can lower daily pond maintenance down to weekly cleaning.

10 Essential Pond Building Tips

• You must have one bunch of anacharis (underwater grass) per square foot of water surface area. This serves as a natural filter and as food for the fish. It grows faster than the fish can eat it.
• 50 - 60% of the surface of the water must be shaded with floating plants. Water lilies are great, as are water hyacinths, water lettuce or water poppies. Just be sure to compost them as they multiply and not allow them loose in a natural waterway.
• You must have fish to complete the balanced ecosystem. I recommend common goldfish. Do not put Koi in your pond unless you have built a koi pond. They will eat all of your plants.
• Do not feed your fish. They will become too big for the pond and upset the ecosystem. You will have an overpopulation problem and all of your fish will die.
• Put in one linear foot of fish for each 25 square feet of pond surface area. If you have 100 square feet of pond, you may have 4 foot long fish, 8 six inch fish or 16 three inch fish and so on.
• Do not allow turtles, crawfish, alligators, ducks, geese, dogs, raccoons, possums, muskrats, nutria or your children to swim in your pond.
• Do not use chemicals!!! EVER! Add a dechlorinator when you first fill the pond and then when you add more than 10% water afterwards.
• Do not worry about pH. It will take care of itself.
• Remove any dead or decaying vegetation regularly so that ammonia does not build up and foul your pond.
• Relax. Your pond will generally take care of itself. I recommend benevolent neglect as the best approach to pondkeeping.

Do not even try to seam large pieces of EPDM or butyl rubber liner together at home. It won't work. If you need an extra large piece, the factory will seam it for you, usually for free or very little money.

Cover Your Liner

Always cover your liner with rocks or water. Liner exposed to the sun can incur damage quickly. Rubber or EPDM liner lasts much longer. Exposed plastic liner, either flexible or a preformed shell will crack in a short time and it cannot be repaired.

When you are buying hose clamps, don't buy the cheap ones...they rust and fall apart. Buy the more expensive steel ones. They will last forever. Same with plastic hose fittings. Buy brass hose fittings.

Building Above Grade

If you do nothing else while building your pond, build it above grade. You can use my method or just pile up the soil you removed from the hole around the edges, but if you don't build it up, run off from your yard can kill your pond.

When you are digging your hole, dig straight down. If you dig a bowl shape you will slide down into the water every time you try to get in your pond to do maintenance.

To find out the square footage of your pond, multiply the length times the width. If your pond is not a rectangle, make your best guess as to length and width.

If your pond is round, multiply the radius squared times 3.14 (pi). That will give you the square footage.

Remember thinking you would never need high school geometry? Wrong.

Selecting pond equipment

When selecting equipment, you should seriously consider the cost of operation. Each amp can cost $103 per year based on a dime per kilowatt hour. What does your local utility charge per KwH. You can look on your bill and find out. Most of your cost comes from running your pump, so be sure to choose the right one. Other costs can be from lighting and bubblers. If you choose the right equipment you can keep your electricity costs down. Consider solar pumps or lights.

When choosing the best pump for your pond, calculate your head loss. Head loss is the vertical distance the pump has to push the water plus the friction caused by the water flowing through the pipes and fittings. If the flow rate is too high for the pipe's diameter, you create more pressure.

Head losses also happen when filters clog with debris and create back pressure; this can be eased by keeping your filter clean. Too many elbows can add to back pressure. Pumping vertically, whether it is to a waterfall or a filter, will also increase head pressure. Running costs increase with head loss, so it is important to keep head loss to a minimum.

If you have a choice, always choose pumps, lights and other accessories that you plug in yourself to an outlet near your pond. If a pump or light is hardwired in by an electrician, you must call an electrician when your pump or light needs replacing.

When you have electrical outlets installed for your pond, always have GFCI's (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters) installed. These will instantly cut off your electricity if the outlet gets wet.

Give Koi Quartered Oranges

Give your koi quartered oranges to nibble on. They love them and it gives them vitamin C. They also love red cabbage. Leave it whole and watch them play with it like a volleyball.

Goldfish Eggs

There is no set time for goldfish eggs to hatch. The warmer the water, the faster they hatch, so don't worry if some take longer than others.

Goldfish are born blackish, brownish gray and gradually change to orange, gold or other adult colors. They are born dark to escape the parents who will have them for breakfast if given the chance. Not all of them change; some stay the same brownish, blackish color all their lives.

Koi

Eating Out of Your Hand

You can tame koi to eat out of your hand more easily if you crouch down low. Have food in your hand and put your hand in the water. Let the food out of your hand slowly. Do this for a few weeks and they will eat from your hand readily. Do not forget that if koi come to your hand to eat, they will also come to the egret or heron who has come for a fresh koi dinner.

Fish Fighting

If you see your fish chasing each other like they are fighting, don't worry, they are not fighting. What you see is fish spawning. You are about have fish eggs, then babies.

Trapping Wildlife

USED If you trap visiting wildlife like raccoons, and want to relocate them, check with the Wildlife Commission to see if (1) you have rights to move them to a more suited environment, (2) if they are prone to mark their territory and return, (3) have the local humane society trap & move them to a more fitting area.

If they are taken to a brand new neighborhood, they are likely to be unable to find food and die.

Fish Feeding

Do not feed goldfish because it turns the pond into an outdoor aquarium, but here's yet another reason not to feed them.

Fish soon realize that when a shape appears at the edge of the pond, food appears. They like that and soon they are trained to eat out of your hand. At least that is what you think. Fish are not the brightest of critters, so when ANY shape appears at the edge of your pond, like a heron, an egret, a crane or a raccoon, they come up to greet the intruder and oops, they become a fresh sushi dinner for a hungry intruder.

Bird Bathing

When you build your pond, make one end very shallow, 3 to 5 inches deep. Put some small pebbles at the bottom and larger rocks around the sides. That allows your bird buddies a place to drink and bathe. If you put plants in there, you will also have a natural bog filter for your pond. Your bird friends will thank you, especially in the winter when water is hard to find.

How do I get rid of a snake?

Depends on how afraid of him you are. You can use a large fish net, catch him and he will get tangled up in it. You can then relocate him where he will be comfortable. Or you can call an exterminator and he will take care of it.

Most snakes are much more afraid of you than you are of them. Unless you have small children, I suggest just not disturbing your snake.

Koi illegal?

Owning or keeping koi is illegal in the state of Maine. Koi are considered a nuisance fish that can invade public waterways and cause native fish to die out. No matter what state you live in, check with your local extension service to find out the status of koi.

Catching Fish

During cold weather, if you have to catch a fish to medicate it rather than medicate the entire pond, pour some warm water in the pond and the fish will come to it. Have your net ready.

Sick fish

As with many animals, when a fish is diseased the other fish will attack and kill it. If you see a sick fish, remove it as soon as you see it. There is a chance you can save it and also not have it infect the other fis

Lethargic Fish

When your night time temps dip below 55 degreesF, you fish will begin hanging out at the bottom of the pond. Don't worry. It's what they do in preparation for their upcoming cold weather protection.

Fish hiding places

In the fall, floating plants get smaller and offer no real place for fish to hide from predators. Put a flat rock over two chunky rocks or put clay pots on their sides in the bottom of your pond so your fish have places to hide. You can also buy 'castles' commercially as hiding places.

Fall Fish Feeding

When temperatures get below 60 degrees F, if you feed your fish at all, start feeding them only 2 or 3 times a week. Their metabolism slows and they cannot digest food quickly. When the temps drop below 55 degrees F, stop feeding them altogether.

Dealing with Raccoons

If you have problems with raccoons, be aware that trying to relocate them after trapping is dangerous and usually illegal. Please call your local SPCA to deal with raccoons.

Foul Water

The most common reason for foul water in the pond is run off from surrounding areas. Build your pond about 4" above the ground to avoid this problem before it starts.

Pest Control

Aphids and many other garden pests can be easily controlled with an inexpensive, homemade insecticide--according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Mix one tablespoon of dishwashing detergent with one cup of cooking oil. When pests strike, mix one to two and one half teaspoons of the detergent oil mix with one cup of water. The detergent causes the oil to emulsify in the water. It can be sprayed on the water lilies every ten days. Besides aphids, the mixture works against whiteflies and spider mites. It will not harm fish.

Chemicals

Chemicals kill! Insecticides, pesticides all kill your plants and fish, even sprayed on the other side of your yard or by your neighbors. Scraping and sanding your house prior to painting will allow particles in your pond that will kill everything. Run off from your lawn or a street or driveway will kill your plants and fish. Remember, chemicals will kill your pond.

Aquarium Charcoal

If you see charcoal mentioned to clean your water or to add to your filter, it means aquarium charcoal , NOT charcoal briquets that you barbeque with.

Scare Away Predators

To scare away predators like herons, egrets, muskrats, raccoons, etc, who think your pond is an all-you-can-eat buffet, get a motion activated sensor that sprays a jet of water when motion is detected. Be careful to turn it off if you are the one heading toward the pond or you will get real wet.

Burrowing Pests

If you live where you are bothered by gophers or rats, put chicken wire under your pond liner before the underlayment and the liner. That will keep the burrowing pests from eating a hole through your liner.

Aeration

When the weather is very hot, consider adding more aeration to your pond. Heat depletes oxygen when fish need it most. You could add another pump or bubbler. Some of you run your pumps on timers so they are off at night. Leave them running 24 hours until the heat emergency is over.

Filtration

Most pond pumps need a prefilter to keep the small debris out of the pump's impeller. If yours doesn't have one, you have already figured that out. If you have a balanced ecosystem, that's all you need. You do not need an expensive biofiltration system, UV lights or any of that.

However, if you feed those fishies, you must have a filtration system. It might be a simple as putting the pump in a container full of lava rock or as elaborate as an outside-the-pond biofilter with a UV light so all water is pumped through the filter and under the UV light so the water is almost sterilized. They are very pricey, but they do work and the pond stays crystal clear.

Biofilter cleaning

If you have a biofilter with your pond, clean it well only once a year. A biofilter's job is to grow beneficial bacteria. If you clean the filter, you kill the bacteria. After you clean it, add a starter dose of beneficial bacteria before starting to use it again.

Pump Costs

If you want to know how much it costs you to run your pond pump, here's the formula to find out: Amps x volts divided by 1000 x KWH cost x 24 hours-a-day x 30.4 days- per-month = cost per month.

Algae Blooms

If you have an algae bloom, do not give into the temptation to pump out the water and start over. You will just have another algae bloom within 3 or 4 days. Put more submerged vegetation in the pond and make sure at least half the pond is covered by floating vegetation. To restore the ecosystem, use a bacteria jump start solution either in your biofilter or directly into your pond water.

Changing Water

Your pond and your veggie garden will benefit if you pump 10% of your pond water into your vegetable garden each week. It's the best fertilizer in the world. And refreshing pond water weekly keeps the water from fouling as easily.

Temperature Inversion

Continuous hot weather causes your pond water to heat and cause a temperature inversion. The cool water on the bottom and all the organic matter and fish waste floats to the top. It uses up available oxygen and your fish all die. Keep organic matter and debris from collecting on your pond bottom. Keep your fish alive in hot weather.

Tea Colored Water?

If you pond is under an oak tree, the water will turn a tea color from the tannin in the leaves. The only way I know to take the tea color out is to use activated charcoal - not briquettes. Put some activated charcoal in a bag of some sort...old panty hose legs are great and put the bag in your filter. It works. Not forever, but it works.

Your UV Light in Winter

If you live where the temps drop below 40 degrees F in the winter and use a UV light, you can remove it until the weather warms again. Algae die off in the winter plus you can save electricity if your UV is not running. Be careful, those bulbs are fragile. And expensive.

Troubleshooting

If your pump stops pumping, touch it to see if it is running. If it is check hoses and check to see if something is stuck in the pump. If it is not running, check your GFCI outlet. You do have one, don't you? If not, get one. If so, push the button to reactivate the circuit. If it does not come back on, you probably have a defective pump. If the circuit continues to break, let it dry out and try it again.

Submersible pumps have a safety switch built in that turns the pump off when it gets too hot. Intermittent starting and stopping means your pump is getting too hot, shutting itself off and when it cools, it is starting again. Soon your pump will stop altogether having burned out. Start planning for a new pump as soons as your pump begins its intermittent behavior.

Debris Removal

Be very careful to remove all debris from your pond before winter arrives. You may want to consider putting netting over your pond to catch leaves. You can used nylon net and make your own or buy special leaf netting from your aquatic nursery or online.

Water Lilies

Water lilies must have a minimum of five hours of direct sunlight daily in order to bloom heavily; the more sun, the better

Fertilize your water lilies at least once monthly. They would prefer twice a month. There are several brands of lily fertilizer and they are all OK.

Water lily flowers open each morning and close each night unless they are night bloomers which do the opposite. The flowers live about three days and die. Pick it off at the base when it dies. As the pads yellow and die, pick those off at the base as well. The outer ring of pads dies first.

Place your water lily pot as deep as you can in your pond. They like to have the top of their pots at least 6" below the water surface. I put them at the bottom of the pond....at least 18" below the surface.

Pot up water lilies in wide, shallow containers rather than thin and deep ones. Dish pans are good, but they really would like to have a perforated pot, so water can flow through the soil.

If you have a natural bottom pond and plant a hardy water lily in the bottom, soon you will have a pond covered with water lilies, choked with water lilies. There is no way to remove them except to rake them out. And they will return in the spring. Planting them in pots does delay the take-over for a few months, but they will take over. And you will be writing to me asking how to kill them. Remember you put them there and watched them grow.

Impatiens?

You can grow impatiens stuck between the rocks around the top of the pond with just their roots in the pond water. They must be in the shade. Water loving house plants can grow the same way. Most of these plants will not survive a winter.

Tadpoles

Do your water lily pads look smaller? Do you see serrations around the edges? Often tadpoles will snack on the edges of water lily pads. Don't worry, the tadpoles will be gone soon and the lily will make more pads.

Pond Plants

Goldfish and koi love hyacinth roots and will eat them causing the hyacinth to stop its filtering action in your pond. If you don't already have too many hyacinths and want to save the ones you have, isolate some of them where the fish can't reach. You can even move them to a bucket of water for a week or so until the roots regrow.

If you plant several different water lilies in one pot, you will get several different colors when they bloom for a wonderful display in the pond. Just remember to to divide them in the spring and repot if they are crowded.

Acorus is a sweet flag, invasive as hyacinths. It grows naturally along banks of any water, maybe a mud puddle if the puddle is there long enough. I keep it potted up in the pond to keep it under control. When starts jumping out of its pot, just whack off all the stems coming from every hole in the pot. If you don't watch out, it will break the pot in its haste to get free.

Acorus gets scale...all the time. Here's what I do. I cut the acorus back to about 1" tall and suberged the pot, plant and all. When it comes back up out of the water, the scale is gone, drowned.

If your water lilies are two or three years old, and are producing lots of leaves, but few blooms, they probably need dividing. Just unpot them, break into pieces, repot thepieces with the largest root systems. Feed only May through October and be sure to let the plants go through dormancy during the winter, warm though it might be

Did you know you can pick water lily blooms and use them as cut flowers in the house. They last a few days and smell heavenly.

August is a great time to cut back and repot your pond plants. It will be warm enough for them to set roots before cold weather arrives. There are special potting mixes made for potting pond plants, but I use a clay soil with very little organic matter in it.

If you have many water lilies in your pond, you may want to stagger the fertilizing schedule. When you fertilize them, you are feeding algae as well. Not feeding them all at once will keep algae growth down.

If you gather plants from the wild, you will bring in parasites and diseases. If you must harvest from the roadsides and swamps, first of all, be careful. Secondly check local laws, it may be illegal. Third, put your plants in a washtub or bucket of water with a cup of so of clorox in it. Leave them there for a week to ten days. That will kill any parasites or other bugs that may have found their way home with you.

When the weather cools and the days shorten, stop feeding your water lilies and allow them to go dormant. Usually September or October is the time to stop depending on where you live.

If you have not yet cut back your Louisiana irises, cyperus or papyrus, do so in September so new growth can start freely in the spring.

Water lilies begin dormancy in September. Their leaves get smaller and smaller and they stop blooming. Don't worry. They are reacting to shorter periods of daylight.

Stop fertilizing the lilies in mid October in the South. By starving the plants at the end of the season, they will form some small, hard and durable tubers which survive the dormant period better than the large fleshy root of the main plant. This, along with dropping the water lily to the bottom of your pond will give you a better chance of your lilies coming back in the spring.

Trees

Did you know it takes at least two average sized trees under optimal conditions to provide enough oxygen for one human? Have you planted your two trees yet?

Bamboo, Banana Trees

The new growth of bamboo and banana trees can poke through your pond liner. Do not plant either one close to your pond. And as invasive as both are, I would use neither in the landscape where your pond is.

Covering the Pond Bottom

No matter what you read, do not cover the bottom of your pond with sand and plant water lilies in it. Water lilies are nothing but pretty weeds and are very invasive. Soon you will have a mat of water lilies covering your pond and have to remove them and the now filthy sand as well. Keep your water lilies potted.