…I’ve tried every method known to man and I can definitively report that unless you have a bog garden at least half the size of your pond, if you live in a sunny clime, you will have algae.
Chemical remediation: bad, because the algae killers are copper. Copper is lethal to small organisms in general, including your processing bacteria, and to fish, once the level builds up. Since copper doesn’t go anywhere or get used up, it builds up and up in your pond, and it’s just not good.
Bog garden: see statement A. Great, but requires a really big space given over to natural plants and bog for it to have enough effect. This was not the year for water hyacinth: nobody’s is growing. Shoulda gotten water lettuce. But we have a 6 foot ring of non-growing water hyacinth that was outcompeted by the algae.
UV filter: yep, UV can be nasty stuff. But 66 watts of UV applied to our pea-soup pond is making steady, sure headway against the plague. We can now see the fish clearly near the surface, and identify individuals 10″ down. We can see the hazy shapes of rocks on the bottom. We are definitively winning. My advice to anybody meditating ‘pond’, budget for a UV filter. Otherwise you will just have a miserable time.
What you really need is to have someone make a spacer algae -> food device…..
Gee…if you lived here in Florida, you could just scoop water hyacinth out of your local retention pond or canal. It’s an invasive menace down here!
I’ve seen it. Which is why it’s illegal to sell water hyacinth in certain tropical areas; or caulerpa weed, I hope! That stuff is trying to take the Mediterranean, and it’s toxic to boot, so very few species eat it.
Mmmm, you’ll note in Rimrunners there is mention of the notorious meatloaf, which Musa swears has fins…spacers notoriously detest fish and algae cakes, which are transmuted into a lot of varied flavors. When the stations like Pell ‘harvest’ one of their fish farms, they sluice the whole thing, fish and algae and all, into a processor, and while you can get an actual fish fillet, no little of it is ‘processed biostuffs’…meaning whatever came out the sluicegate at the same time.
My favorite variant on the food use of the station bio-oxygenating system is the newts in Bujold’s Ethan of Athos.
(The algae is so efficient and grows so well that it has to be cropped, so the newts do that, but then you have all these newts…)
I’ve had good results with barley straw, though it isn’t a panacea.
I figure all spaceports sell algae crackers and krill paste so parents can give it to their kids to encourage them not to grow up to be spacers.
Well, I was going to ask the landlady if I could start digging a pond in the east yard, but really, NO WAY. With all of the chemical fertilizers, etc. that go onto the crops in the fields, I’d have a toxic heavy metal pond and nothing to show for it but a lot of sweat. I envy the people up the road who have a pond 50 feet in diameter, 3 – 4 feet deep, and a hookup for the fire department to use that water if necessary. I don’t have a shovel that big, stamina that long, or soil that amenable to digging. It’s clay, f’godssakes, and it’s been overgrown for years. I can’t put one in on the front yard, either, because the farmers drive their trucks all over the place and you never know when they’re going to cut a little too close. Not even a plastic above ground pond, if I’m going to have a pond, I want to be able to 1) have fish in it 2) be able to sail paper boats on it 3) fall in and not drown.
I’m still amazed at the amount of work the two of you put into that yard and how much you’ve accomplished. Renting a home is a pain because it’s so hard to “customize” it to your own tastes, and if you want to make any upgrades or improvements, you have to have permission, or the landlady/landlord has to foot the bill and have it done.
Joe, you use a *liner*, so there’s no way your water contacts the local earth [ours is glacial till on old flow basalt, and any pond you put on it would vanish down into a mile of cracked rock.] An EPDM liner, which has an underlayment to prevent puncture, and is tough as rhino hide in the first place. Now your local water may be bad, but mind, we ourselves surrounded by wheat fields, and even worse, domestic lawns, onto which horrific things have been poured. If you want to stop the trucks, import a fallen tree or some really big nasty boulders to define your margin. A truck may not respect your pond, but the trunk of a good-sized tree serving as your edge, and sitting bench, will convince him this is not a good driving area. Likewise some skull-sized and larger rock used as a border will convince him that would not be a good driving surface.
OK city dweller here plus newcomer to this blog so you may have used and dismissed this method but for some reason I get a Gardener’s catalog which offers barley balls and pads (they say they are no longer available and I don’t know if it’s that they are currently sold out or it’s permanent) but they sound interesting: http://www.gardeners.com/Barley-Pad-with-Flotation-Frame/33-879,default,pd.html
Waster hyacinth is a nuisance here in RI…not illegal but you will get dirty looks for mentioning it in any garden center.
Happy to hear that the pond is clearing…..these are the joys of having water around. I learned my lesson last year when I did not get the pool pump and filter in early enough and had TADPOLES in my pool….that was a nasty, dirty, expensive lesson I took care not to repeat this year! Nice to look down and be able to see your little fishy friends. You and Jane have done amazing things with your yard! 😀
Yes, I do use barley—in the form of extract; and in a powdered form which supports lots of bacteria. It’s excellent. But again, I’d have to totally fill the waterfall with a bale of barley—which I could do, and it probably would be a good idea…but I kind of balk at the cleanout: facing the how-do-I-dispose-of-it with an aromatic, rotten, slimey barley bale in a city, and in a pit-chamber that can’t be moved, only cleaned out with your hands and a hook…sort of like horse stall cleanout, only aquatic and full of life. I’m just not sure how it would be. Although, yes, I have thought of it. I could fit about 3/4 of a bale into that waterfall chamber. And if we have more trouble I may seriously think about it.
Got any advice about dealign with algae in a birdbath? I know… frequent cleaning! But it’s cast concrete with a celtic knot design on the bottom, so we are talking lots and lots of little crevices and nooks for algae to hide in, so getting it totally clean is impossible. And it’s the nasty red algae, too. I don’t want my birds (or dogs… they think the birdbath is just great to drink out of) getting ill, but keeping a very small shallow pool of water from growing algae is being difficult. Would movement help, or is that just for mosquitos?
I was looking for entirely different garden stuff but came across this product this morning @ www-dot-pondplantsdirect-dot-com. It’s called Green Clear Aquatic Algaecide and is EPA certified safe for fish, plants etc., click on algae products for more info.
Joe, my brother has two preformed pools, the larger half in the ground, the other above ground for a waterfall….very nicely landscaped….don’t know about little boats as he collects water lilies, but he does have goldfish which he winters over. He gave up on koi as he got tired of being the great blues cafe.
BTW, CJ, the image of the great blue on the telephone wire has gotten many a laugh and sympathetic groan! 😀
Easiest way, first treat it with Chlorox to get rid of the algae that’s there, then flush it liberally with plain tapwater to get rid of the chlorine smell, then fill it with chlorinated water. As long as you don’t have fish to worry about, chlorine at city tapwater levels isn’t going to hurt. You may have to apply the Chlorox bath several times to really discourage what’s gotten down in the crevices, but ultimately that should take care of it. Your red algae is actually cyanobacteria, but chlorine gets that too.
@philospher77….the product I posted above is supposed to be good for birdbaths. 😉
Found a way your brother might be able to have koi: a canopy of fine wire—lines spaced about a foot apart, stretching over the pond between two boards—the fishing birds will not like it. Another thing that works is a device called a Scarecrow, which is a motion sensor that starts a water jet that sweeps the area. These may be water birds, but they don’t like to be hosed down by a weird and rowdy apparatus. It is also supposed to work with raccoons. So does (for the latter) a shaker box of powdered coyote urine. 😉
Thanks….I’m going to see him in August. I wonder if coyote urine works on coyotes. 😉
PS If anyone is interested in the algicide I mentioned….Google it….wide variety of prices!
The Scarecrow might, but they’re adaptive little so-and-so’s.
http://www.pestcontrol-products.com/urines_all.htm
They have wolf and lion urine, which definitely will deter coyotes.
CJ, Even with the liner, I’d have to have a very high border if I were to put the pond on the east side, because when we get more than a half-inch of rain, the fields literally run and it pours down through that part of the yard. If I did it on the west side, then I have the two trees that would be dropping leaves, etc., into the water. The apple tree would be all right, but the maple is just huge.
I don’t think the landlady would want me digging, anyway, but…..
That is why you pile all you excavate into a high berm, so runoff will go around the pond. And the filter and industrious netting can cope with leaves: you recall ours sits under a hawthorne and beside two needle-shedding 40 foot hemlocks. Although it does pose a bit of work.
You can also employ pond netting, a fine net of wide mesh that you stake over the pond to keep leaves out.
It’s slowly sinking in (nt, I didn’t intend that to be a pun).
I thought I was late getting this info to, you because you mention using Barley, but the site I have been at (http://ohioline.osu.edu/a-fact/0012.html) suggests putting the straw in mesh bags for ease of cleanup. (I can’t speak to personal use, our pond is much smaller than yours so we’ve just been skimming the algae and duckweed.) I have read elsewhere that the best trees to have around your pond are maple (which my grandmother had over hers) because the leaves have the most beta keratin left in them when they drop (hence the lovely red and orange colors) and break down more slowly than many others, thus creating an excellent winter food source for the small critters that your fish then can eat.
We’ve got an established back yard, no maples, but hawthorne, which has a laxative effect (at least on people)—and hemlock (the tree, not the poisonous herb.) I do use liquified barley, and have used the small netted bags, but they just don’t make any headway against the sunlight here. We also have a pond vac, and that’s a bear to use: just getting it set up around the pond and toting it about every 20 feet…but it does clean things up nicely. You vacuum for about 20 seconds, then it stops on its own and drains for 20 seconds, then starts up again…kind of tedious, but effective. The other part of the problem with it is having to maneuver over the puddles it creates with its refuse line. But it’s at least a way to suck up the algae.
I have managed to get some pictures of what has made a nest in my jasmine: wood rats. They are actually kind of cute, and according to the nature guy, they don’t cause problems, so they will get to stay. I’ve posted some pictures of them up in my gallery on Jane’s blog, along with pics of Trink and Katie. The best idea of Katie’s true color is the picture of her by the back door. The flash tends to wash her out, but she is a very pretty copper.
And for anyone who wants to post pictures somewhere, but gets stuck by the file sizes and wants a nice easy way to change them: photobucket. Upload your picture to photobucket, and they have a handy “resize” button. Just pick one of the pre-made sizes (or make a custom one), and it gives you the exact same image in that size. There are probably more techy ways of doing this, but I like the simplicity of using photobucket. The only drawback is the upload/download bit, but even then, if you want to share the pictures with other folk, that may not be a bad thing.
PS. The wood rat pictures were taken with a BirdCam. The one with the built-in flash. I was not waiting around all night with a camera on the off-chance that they decided to come out! The BirdCam is really handy for letting you see things in your yard that you never actually see in person.
The wood rats *are* cute! 😀 The don’t look very ratty though. Nice pix of Trink and Katie. What is BirdCam?