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The Outdoor Garden Pond
If you are considering building a pond or even if you already have some pond experience, this article will introduce you to some novel tips and tricks, dispel some myths and perhaps reinforce good notions you may already have for pleasant endeavors with aquatic gardening. Whether your preference is for flexible pond liners dressed to make a natural-looking oasis or for formal appointments in stone, concrete or tile, there are commonalities to the keeping of all outdoor ponds that we can easily summarize for success. Garden ponds can, and usually should be very simple to construct and operate. Maintenance tasks are minimal and require less time than any other expressions of keeping aquariums or aquatic features. With good planning and a strict adherence to some simple rules you can enjoy a enjoy pond-keeping like a pro! Let me take you on a pictorial "crash course" of sound techniques to make sure your aim is spot-on:
Far and away, the biggest concern and complaint about garden ponds is algae. For this reason more than any other, folks tired of fighting a losing battle with the unwanted greens ignore or shut down their ponds. This is most unfortunate since prevention or solutions to unwanted algae are inexpensive and often quickly rendered! Dreadful mistruths and half-truths abound about causes and cures for these low-lives (literally), most notoriously that excess sunlight causes algae and reducing light will cure it. Bunk. Rubbish. In plain language, sunlight does not cause nuisance algae… excess nutrients cause unwanted algae. You can find many successful ponds in full blazing sun with crystal clear water, and find many more ponds in poor or indirect light swimming in green scum. Reducing unwanted algae is entirely about nutrient control.
New hobbyists are admittedly prone to being eager and may overstock their pond (too many fishes added or added too quickly) and overfeed their new fishes. In such cases, it could not come at a worse time since a new pond may be rich in minerals or nutrients from being recently filled with tap or other source water (e.g., well water is often loaded with nutrients that fuel algae). In the early stages, filters are immature and plants are not established or may not even have been added yet. The textbook solution is prevention and patience. Add as many plants and filters (manmade and/or bog) as you can early, and proceed very slowly with fish stocking and feeding. This speaks directly to the issue of nutrient export elements (plants and filters) versus nutrient import elements (hungry fishes, turtles, frogs, etc.).
Pondkeepers with an appreciation for bog and submerged aquatic plants can even get to the point very soon where no manmade filters are required whatsoever! Even large pools can remain crystal clear all year around and enjoy hearty loads with fishes that do not need fed, all for having patience in wait for strong plant populations to grow. Read on about how to find and pot those plants (and how to still avoid nuisance algae if you are too eager and impatient, with a small investment in technology!). The fundamental goal here is to strike a balance much like a successful ecosystem in the wild. We want seed our pools with desirable nutrient consumers and provide these organisms with just enough sustenance to thrive in a tidy aquatic microcosm. Some of the wonderful dynamics at play include: insects attracted to the water that lay eggs and provide larvae for fishes to eat, maintaining water quality so that just enough microalgae develops to sustain grazing herbivores (snails, fishes, etc.), mechanical filters catch gross particulate matter for quick export (cleaned frequently), pumps used for water circulation or biological filters, maturing rooted and floating plants absorb considerable amounts of nutrients from decaying matter (fish waste, leaf litter, etc), and small predators like frogs and catfish control the potentially explosive reproductive rates of common carp and goldfishes by eating the smaller fry.
Buying a water pump: Even if you choose to forego buying or building a large biological filter because you'll have a very heavy plant population and low fish load, you will still need to protect water pumps from clogging quickly or wearing out too soon. Few garden ponds can survive (especially with fishes) without some form of constant water movement. It’s a sometimes fatal mistake yet not uncommonly misadvised directive that shutting the pumps off at night is OK to save on electricity, or for any other reason. This is dangerous and not recommended. Since plants and algae only photosynthesize and produce oxygen during the day, natural biological processes lead to a drop in oxygen levels at night and turning off of circulating pumps lets this drop fall even further. Frustrated pond keepers that have fish that seem healthy by day but are dead the next morning should consider oxygen deprivation (especially when it’s the larger/largest fishes that die first). Even without turning off pumps, the dynamic can occur in systems that are suffering badly from "green water" (suspended unicellular algae), which due to their high density, can lethally lower oxygen levels (for these fishes) at night with respiration. Enough said… everyone gets a pump and runs it full time at least for the active pond season (above 50 F). There are many wonderful features with water pumps for your pond anyways like fountains and waterfalls.
There are many choices among water pumps starting with external versus internal. Beyond any obvious constraints (construction and layout of pond, aesthetic preferences, etc.) that lead you to a specific pump size or placement, one of the most likely influences on your purchase should be efficiency. There are sometimes extraordinary differences in power consumption between brands for like-sized pumps. A good pump can be had for most ponds utilizing no more than a few dollars in electricity monthly. These tend to be the magnetic drive units, which have an impeller that "floats" on a shaft inside the pump housing. They do not suffer from resistance placed on them by valves used to reduce water flow (they actually run better/longer with at least a little resistance). And the modern evolution of this style pump has essentially overcome previous shortfalls with strength to operate the pump at great head (pressure and height, as with long runs of pipe and many joints of constriction). Only for the heaviest duty needs will a direct-drive pump likely be needed. These units sometimes are much stronger and can pump higher than magnetic drive units, but they come with a price – most notably expense to operate. Most popular direct-drive pump models in the hobby are not submersible either. Pictured here (inset) is a nice mid-range pump line: the Supreme "Mag-Drive". They are a good value in my opinion - balancing cost of purchase, efficiency and expected life.
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