BCU - Water
Ponds Entrance
Mini Bog
Contact B.Howe
The Fish Pond
May 23: The pond cleared fully for the first time this past weekend. The 28" deep pool looks as though it is only a few inches to the bottom. Plants have been added and all of the fish are still alive. A garter snake has moved into the area, but since the plants haven't grown in around the pond yet, we don't often find it close by. The kids and I added a few tadpoles but they seem to have disappeared, been eaten or escaped, over the last week.
Plants/Fish per pool:
Deep Pool - hardy water lily (planted in basket of kitty litter), three water hyacinths (floating), and a bundle of hornwort (attached to a small rock with an elastic band) / 9 small goldfish.
Middle Pool - water lettuce (floating), Yellow Flag Iris (potted in garden clay with white decorative rock on top), 2 cattails (potted same as iris), a bundle of hornwort (attached to a small rock with an elastic band)/ a 4" and a 2" goldfish.
Shallow Pool - a bundle of elodea, two kinds of mints (Hillary's Lemon Mint, Peppermint), Lemon Balm / 2 small goldfish.
I'll be adding a diagram (akin to my garden beds sections) which will give you a better idea of where things are.
Thanks for stopping by,
Brett
Previous Entries:
May 04: The siphoning system is working like a dream. To test it, I ran the pump full out and the water level in the barrels only shifted by about a half inch. In my book that is negligible. I have since cut the pump back to half volume, and am happy to say that a couple of fish have actually made it through the tubes. I am also finding that the filter I rigged is functioning beyond my own expectations. If you can't tell I'm very happy with the pond so far.
I have begun to experiment with plants a little. In order to get something in there to draw off some of the nutrients, I have placed oregano, feverfew, and lemon balm into baskets and suspended them from the sides in the shallow pool. All of the plants are bare root (no soil, kitty litter, etc) and all are doing just fine after about 5 days. These are simply tests for my own curiousity and will not be in the final planting scheme, I intend to shift to more traditional pond plants.
My wife surprised me and brought home a Yellow Flag Iris and a Spiral Rush one day. I have potted the iris in a basket with kitty litter and placed it in my medium pool on top of an overturned plastic pot. The Rush is in a kind of mini-bog I improvised behind the barrels, because it'll ultimately grow larger than the barrels. I also planted a Lobelia that I had kicking around in this mini-bog for height and colour.
And in a final fit of experimentation, I re-located one of my one-year-old aquarium goldfish into the medium pool to see how it would handle the move outside. It has done just fine and seems happy. It does, however, look like a giant against the new feeder fish it now resides with.
April 21: (evening) I couldn't wait! I know there is a leak in the middle pool and it is being allowed to drain, but I thought to myself, "Why should the deep pool, which couldn't possibly spring a leak, be left empty?" So, now it isn't empty. We picked up a dozen colourful feeder goldfish to populate the pond with, and Heather insisted on getting a plastic water lily to float on top so they had some shade and a place to hide. When we arrived home the kids carefully floated the fish on the ponds to acclimatize them, while I hooked up a 4" airstone in the deep pool. A little while later the fish were released and seem to be happily moving about their new home. We have thunderstorms and showers moving through the area today so I won't be out watching them much, but you can be sure I'll be going out to check often enough.
It will still be a few weeks before I am able to pick up the plants for the pond. That should be a new experience - looking forward to it. In the meantime, I'll be fixing the leak in the middle barrel, and getting the new siphon tubes installed and secured. I also picked up a small pond pump which I'd like to use on the spitter rather than the little indoor pump I have on it now. In my spare time, I will be figuring out how to make a small basket filter for the new pump as well. I have picked up a few pieces, but still need to sit down and play with it a bit. In theory, the entire pond should be up-and-running within a few weeks now.
April 21: (afternoon) There it is! This is how the pond looked immediately after I filled it for the first time (April 18). On the left is the deep barrel, rear-right is the middle depth barrel, and in the front is the shallow. The big plastic frog is my spitter (draws from the barrel behind it and spits into the one in front of it), and the big plastic turtle is a decoration.
There are a couple of tubes on the ground around the pond in the picture. These were my test siphon tubes, which worked but were too narrow to be practical. I have purchased 1.5" sump hose to use in it's place. The pond managed to survive a whole three minutes before the kids began dropping rocks and clumps of clay in. That has been rectified. So, at least you can all see what it is I'm talking about now.
April 18: We have a pond. Of course, pictures are pending, I've taken them and they'll be going in soon I hope. In the meantime, here is what I've discovered:
1/ The middle barrel (18") has a leak :-( I guess I missed a spot when I siliconed the cap and plug onto the barrel. Easily rectified though, and will be shortly. I'm letting the other two sit for a while to see if anything develops with them.
2/ My homemade spitter worked great, but I still plan on getting a proper outdoor one though. I drilled a hole in the mouth of a large plastic garden frog we had laying around the yard, shoved a tube down it's throat and out it's belly. The tube was just large enough to accomodate another section of tube which had been fitted into a small pump from an indoor fountain. Good little pump, it was able to lift the water about 2' vertically and at a good flow rate.
3/ The proposal, as described below, works - and well! For aesthetic reasons I had to move the pump into the middle pond and spit into the shallow one, but the water flows just fine. I found it necessary to slow the pump down a little again, I used the same narrow tubing as in my first indoor tests, but today purchased some sump-pump tubing that I think will work much better.
4/ Total cost to date: $14.00(cdn) - This reflects the actual money spent specifically on the pond and does not include the parts I already had but had no use for. It will start to go up when I start purchasing fish, plants, a proper spitter, etc. The Proposal:
What I am proposing to do (and started to impliment) is to create three water gardens which are linked together and large enough to support a variety of plants and a few fish. Easy in theory, but I'm waiting for my theory to fail me.
I have taken two of my 55 gallon rainbarrels, and chopped them up. One barrel was cut roughly in half and the bottom was sold at a garage sale last year . The top measures 18" deep and will be my middle pool. On the second barrel I removed the top 10" to act as my shallow pool, and the bottom 30" will be my deep pool. All of the pools measure two feet in diameter.I will be arraying the three barrels (more than likely) in a typical triangle pattern. Since I haven't picked a location for the ponds yet, their locations in this discussion must be considered arbitrary. The one thing that will hold true, despite the arrangement of the pools, is that the flow of water will always be from the spitter, to the deep pool, then to the middle pool, then the shallow, and finally back to the spitter.
The flow of water between the barrels will occur with the help of 4" tubes. The tubes will be set deep on the intake side and near the surface in the output pool. I have tried the idea with the barrels partially filled and it seems to work quite well. For the test I was using smaller tubing than I intend to use on the pond, but the three ponds still tried to maintain the water level and siphoned from one to the next as the spitter pushed water back into the first. One thing I did notice is that the water level in the shallow barrel remained lower than the others. I am assuming this is an unavoidable side-effect, necessary to initiate the siphoning from barrel to barrel. Also, I had a strong flow of water in the small tube, of course matching the output of the spitter. I am expecting that with the 4" tubing this flow will be reduced so as not to inhibit the fish from swimming between barrels.
I am trying to achieve a low maintenance/low cost pond. I do not want to sustain more than a couple gold fish, and a few varieties of plants. In time, this may change, and if I decide to enlarge I'll be able to remove the barrels and have most of my hole already dug for me. But that is then - for right now, I have the barrels all sealed and ready to go, I have the rough location, now I just need to stick it in the ground and get it running. I'll keep you posted.