Startup is always a pita, and more so than usual this odd year, with cold weather—and my local store deciding to stock chlorine remover instead of a remover for both chlorine and chloramine, my feed store people complete clueless as to what chloramine is, or does, (it’s a stable, ie, hard to remove, form of chlorine) and stocks it in 14.00 bottles of a pint. A pint!, 1 teaspoon treating 100 gallons. I have a 5000 gallon pond that I need to do so major work on!
So until my Amazon order gets here, I’m just going out every two hours and washing out the filters. When I can actually run the pond vacuum, I can help this a lot—but until then—every 2 hours. At night I just leave the filter canted up a bit to let water enough get through to keep it from clogging off the water flow and overheating the pump.
Scuze me—I have to go out there and hose out the filter again!
Don’t forget to comparison shop with places like Foster & Smith….which has a pond section and frequent specials. I don’t tend to use many of the pond products as I rely on an ecosystem approach without hardware and chemicals. But I do use their wild bird, aquarium and dog products!
Oooo…do you have pics online somewhere? And do you have lots of shade? Ours is pretty exposed, which means a constant battle with algae right now. Once some of the overhanging shrubs get established, it should help.
I wish we could, 🙁 and we’re working on it, but it’s going to take some time for our plants, both outside and in the water, to get big enough to truly do some good. And even then, unfortunately, ecosystem doesn’t work for top-off and water changes which have to be done with city water, which means chemicals you have to treat for. What I’m not sure was quite clear is that we need to do another major water change as part of the opening up process, which we can’t do until we can treat for the incoming chemicals. We did what we could with the chemicals on hand, but we really need to do at least one more go-round with the vacuum, but can’t until we have the stuff to treat with. Sigh.
Note all this “we” business. Except for the yard cleanup, the pond has been on CJ so far. Bravely done, lady! Hope we can get ahead of it this year!
I have LOTS of aquatic plants and my ponds aren’t big….just mini-ponds. Biggest is 150g (I can’t fit the 300g stock tanks in my vehicle or I’d have some of those too). I can’t put in the ‘in-ground’ pond until I put the solarium on the house. Since the bid I got was just about the same amount as I paid for my first HOUSE, I went into shock mode and haven’t gotten any further. I can’t do the work myself….too many joint problems and no expertise. It’s cheaper, for me, in the long run, to hire out help. I also use daphnia to help clear the water in the tanks where they fish are way too large to pay attention to teeny little crustaceans.
I’m using mostly red-stemmed parrotfeather, and I’ve learned that both hornwort and cabomba are hardy west of the Cascades. So I have lots of oxygenating plants. I have waterlilies also, but I don’t think they contribute as much to water quality. My water district adds chlorine (I called to ask) so I don’t have to worry about the ammonia spikes you get with treating chloramines.
I do shade the tanks with potted plants (Japanese maples, flowering red current, etc) but need to give the waterlilies enough light so they bloom.
I do look forward to having an in-ground pond with landscaping since I’m an avid gardener. I’m lucky enough to have lots of specialty stores very close to me (Pan Intercorp – koi, Moorehaven Water Gardens) and am an avid active member of the Greater Seattle Aquarium Society so can have pond parties with members coming over to help. I provide various refreshments and other fuels.
I do more goldfish than koi as I’m not really keen on koi in general (morphologically). Shubunkins are my favorites although I did summer 2 ryukins last year….will probably give them 150g stock tank this summer as they grew so much I can’t really put them in the 20+ tub they had when they were the size of pingpong balls. And the sarassa tank breeds every year…..giving away babies!
Ooo…we’re coming over for a Mariner’s game soon. We’ll have to check out those stores. I wonder if that parrotfeather winters over here. I like that! We’re slowly building up our around the edge plants.
The parrotfeather (Myriophyllum sp.) may be one of the icky aquatics for Washington. Since the vendors don’t give a species name, I can’t verify whether it’s banned for sure or not. I have the red-stem variety. I bought mine at Moorehaven, but the next time I was there they said they could no longer stock it. SO I bought it when it was legal. You are welcome to some with the caveat that it may not be legal where you live (scratching head). In fact, I have a bin full of it that I haven’t dumped yet….last summer I tried to summer Danio choprae outside. I just cleaned that bin out of most of the java moss (also hardy in western WA) to donate to the Greater Seattle Aquarium Society auction this weekend. The Danios survived but didn’t spawn like the whiteclouds do. I might have a daphnia starter for you as well as the populations are beginning to build. Probably D. pulex (but I’m not an invert biologist). Moorehaven is about 15 minutes from me….and Pan Intercorp (check their hours….they aren’t open often) is less than a mile from Moorehaven. Both are in the Kenmore area (just north of Seattle) right on 522 (if you drive west of the 522/405 interchange on 522)….it becomes Bothell Way. Check my profile info….I think I put my e-mail info there and you can probably access that profile. I also have some extra hornwort but that may not be hardy on the east side.
My tiny pond has no fish (I think goldfish might be fun, but I suspect they would just end up as dinner for the local raccoons) but it does have four resident frogs, the largest of which would easily fit on my palm. It gets shade until about 2 or 3 pm, then direct sun for the rest of the afternoon, and last year we had to drain it completely (a messy job, yuck, and a bummer for any tadpoles there may have been) due to that suspended green algae. I finally got the bright idea to shade it with a sun umbrella, just stuck into a stand, which actually kept the algae from returning. I’m planning to set up the umbrella a lot sooner this year!
Indeed, beware of raccoons. As I have griped here in years past, they are my nemesis and dearly love to go goldfish hunting in small water gardens. Unfortunately for me, they also love to rip any plants I have in my shallow, small water garden to shreds: “ooh, what is this?” rrrrip “Is it edible? No. Ooh, but what about this plant?” rrrip!
Daphnia I too would like to get for algae control, even though my little pond is in partial shade, it builds up at points.
Knock on wood….my Siberian huskies mark all around my raised ponds and the local raccoons don’t seem to bother them. It may be that the stock tanks are just too tall for raccoons as well. But they haven’t bothered the smaller bins either, although I put mesh covers over them to keep the great blue herons from browsing on fishes. I do that with the stock tanks as well. I’m close enough to a fish stream to worry about otters, but so far, so good (another knock on wood).
There’s one solution I don’t want to take, which is a line of wires a foot apart at roof level above the pond. Even with flutter strips there’s too great a chance of wounding a bird, and I’d hate to do that.
I have no idea whether this is “Unobtanium”, but lightly sun-filtering netting mounted 10 – 15 feet above the ground could help control both your algae and feathered poachers and be quite visible as well, all assuming that your plants could tolerate some shade. If you used a few static lines with traveler rings to carry it and perhaps a length of light PVC pipe as a boom for the leading edge, you could use a looping halyard to set or furl the screen at your convenience. Flutter strips could be attached opposed to the screen so that birds would always be warned away from the standing rigging. I have no clue as to availability and cost, but it sure seems an elegant solution to a host of problems including overbearingly sunny days in midsummer!
One chemical you can safely add without screwing up your chemistry is Phosphate Remover. It’s spendy, but goes a long way, and water near cities and agricultural areas is just rife with it. It’s algae fertilizer, and animals don’t like it much, so the more you can ‘remove’ with it, ie, bind chemically so it doesn’t feed the algae, the better.
Daphnia work well on the unicellular suspended algae. I do most of the pond balancing at work for one very large pond and several smaller fountain/ponds, and we were having trouble with one of the smaller ponds (in full sunlight) and green water until a serendipitous infestation of daphnia. I think the local sparrows transferred them in, they like to bathe in it. A few White Cloud Mountain Minnows (the local pet store sells them as feeders) keep the daphnia under control without interesting the wildlife, so I didn’t have to do any complete water changes on that pond last summer. Just clean out the gunk the gardener dropped in (hedge clippings, grass, etc), with a bit of splashing and top it off.
The big pond however requires a water change, as the boss insisted on putting in about a bazzillion feeder goldfish that have grown up. There’s no way short of a water change to keep up with that bioload! The water is warming up and once the sun finally (FINALLY! IT WILL HAPPEN!) breaks out, that pond will turn into pea-soup. Sigh. All I can say is thank goodness our tap water is good, no chloramines or phosphate. Its so clean and soft I used to discourage people from getting guppies when I was working at the pet store, they were just not happy in our tapwater without adding stuff.
I wish I could get some daphnia. I’d love to have them.
The fishies love them too, which is a big part of the reason the big pond doesn’t have them. I noticed the other day the little pond is swarming with daphnia again, probably need to put a couple more white clouds in. They’re great little fish, actually one of the few (like goldfish) that are NOT tropicals.
I don’t know how this would work in the environment of a pond, but certainly in swimming pools, chloramines primarily arise from insufficient chlorine, and the simplest way to get rid of the chloramines is to increase your free chlorine levels. So if the flora and fauna can handle a brief chlorine spike, that could be a way to knock back the chloramines, although you would likely then have to use the chlorine remover to deal with the excess!
Alas, the fishes’ gills wouldn’t like it. This sets them up for infections, even on the mild only slightly poisonous level.
But thank you—interesting chemistry. I work mostly with fishy chemistry, but seeing how it works, definitely interesting.
OTOH, I can say that the water is clearing considerably.
Otoh, the pond is now crystal clear. I’m a little worried about moving the winter shield off, because it gives the fish comfort when they get drowsy from the cold nights, and it protects them from raccoons, but it would be nice to see all of them out.