a healthy pond (Garden Ponds & Water Features in general)

Member Name: nishikoi

Product:	Garden Ponds & Water Features in general
Date:	21/04/03 (1894 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: watching the fish

Disadvantages: there are none

I love ponds. They are a big part of my life. Ponds will give you relaxation and joy. But in order to get this you need to keep your pond up to scratch. They are quite complex and there are lots of ways to achieve a good quality pond.
I have three ponds. I have a small 2ftx4ftx3ft deep pond, I have a 10ftx9ftx3ft deep pond and a koi pond, which is 13ftx6ft5ft deep. Ponds come and you can make into different kinds. You can make formal, semi formal, informal and semi informal. You can make them out of liner, concrete or buy a performed pond.

In order to keep a healthy pond there are 4 rules you must follow:

DON’T OVER STOCK
DON’T OVER FEED
YOU MUST HAVE A PUMP
YOU MUST HAVE A FILTER BOX AND UV (ultra violate light)

When your pond starts to mature or after the first year you may experience duckweed, blanket weed for pond sludge.

Out of the three blanket weed has to be the worst. It is terrible stuff. It clogs up the pump and smoothers your plants and fish. The first way to get around it is to fill your pond with 2/3 of pondweed e.g. Canadian pondweed. This will starve the blanket weed of oxygen. The disadvantage to this is that you can’t see this fish as well. This has to be the cheapest way. The next way you could get rid of it is to buy chemicals to kill it, after you have added the treatment and it starts to die, you must remove it or this will rot and start the cycle all over again. The next way is to by a filter box with really strong magnets on it this is highly affective. Another affective way is to buy a pulse machine. This is wire wrapped around the tubes into the filter box, a pulse meter sends pulses of electricity and kills the blanket weed.
The number one way to kill blanket weed is to buy a sand filter, these work by sand swirling around in a tube with the pond water, these kill all types of algae.
Pond sludge looks horrible and causes a filter box to clog up if it cant take t
he waste. The best way to get rid of pond sludge is to buy a pond vac. This is basically a hover that sucks out the dirt. You can buy a less expensive one than an electric on called a trident mini pond vac, this works via the hosepipe.
The best way to get rid of duckweed is to get it all out with a net and then buy some treatment to kill the spores off.
To stop green water you must buy an UV this will clump the algae together and then the filter box will take this out.
If you have a lot of debris around the pond the rather than having a fountain pump, buy a solid handing pump. This will take particles up to 10mm.
In order to have fish you need to have oxygen, so build a waterfall or have some sort of splashing water. If you are going to keep koi you need a lot of oxygen.
I would also say have a lot of plants in your pond as this will also make oxygen.
If you stick to all of this you will have a healthy pond.

Summary: