GlassWalker
Member
This pond started about a couple months ago... I saw a free pond going in local facebook group, and grabbed it. It is about 6ft long, 3ft wide kidney shape. Estimated volume around 300L, so pretty small. It is dug about 6in into the ground in the hopes of giving it a little winter resistance. It is still very much a work in progress. I saw a tacky squirting koi ornament I rather like too much, and I've also bought a cheap filter box with the idea of putting more aquatic plants outside the pond.
I had in the past wanted a koi pond, but by the time I priced it up to do a proper job, I knew my house was inappropriate. I don't intend to stay here that long to make it worth while. With this smaller pond, koi were out, but I did add a bunch of shubunkin.
Back a bit, since this is a plant forum, I thought I'd add plants to help with the filtration. I have an internal filter in the pond, which has a depressingly small sponge and biomedia, even adding more I feared it wasn't much. The aquaria I have at home have more filtration than this. It is rated for a pond 10x the volume, but I find that hard to believe. So plant wise, I picked 6 types that apparently don't care much about water level, and stuck them in shallow baskets on each end.
According to the plant labels, I have:
Brasilian micro sword - Lilaeopsis brasilensis
Slender club rush - Scirpus cernuus
Slender reedmac - Typha laxmanii
Great spearwort - Ranunculus lingua grandiflora
Water mint - Mentha aquatica
Yellow water iris - Iris pseudacorus
I do note when I tried searching for these, the spelling was different. I also got some elodera thrown in for good measure.
Anyway, less than a week after adding the plants, I was looking to add fish. As a precaution I did a water test and found a ton of ammonia and nitrite. Where did it come from? The plants I repotted into aquatic soil. Did it come from that? Regardless, no fish until that goes away. The filter was on and as I had some bottled bacteria product free with media, I might as well use that. Now, I don't know if it was the filter or the plants, but the ammonia and nitrite disappeared in a matter of days. Far faster than my distant attempts at ammonia cycling way back when I started. Fish went in the next weekend and I didn't think more about it.
Fast forward to last weekend. Plants are mostly looking good, but the mint has some holes in leaves. Presumably from a pest than a deficiency. I know water tests aren't popular around here, but I will say, nitrate came back as zero over repeated tests. PO4, K, Mg were non-zero. That's when I started wondering, should I fertilise the pond? I have 10 small fish in at the moment and they don't seem to be feeding much, as they don't seem to be settling yet.
I still have my EI kit from my earlier high tech attempts, so I have been throwing in small amounts of that. The dose will be too small for conventional EI. I have just seen the Little Shop of Horrors thread, so it seems maybe I could/should go higher.
At this point, I should add the pond position isn't significantly shaded. I am debating building some kind of structure over it for multiple reasons.