It’s the annual algae soup festival—we’re having to wash the filter twice a day, and the koi don’t tend to eat that kind of algae.
First thing I have to do is change out the UV light bulb in the anti-algae UV filter. That could be expired, and these specialized lights don’t burn out before they cease to be effective.
Then when I get my hands on that pond vac, which is a powered one—the last struggled to remove a teaspoon of algae, and that went back to the store—I’m going to have a mammoth, messy job. You suck up two gallons of algae, turn off the vac, spit it out into the garden, then repeat, for all 4000 gallons. 😉 I can’t wait.
But it will certainly look a lot better when I’m done.
We can’t get water hyacinth for 2 more weeks. That would help—to have it absorbing nutrients that are feeding this algae. 6 weeks on the 2 little koi we want. 2 weeks for the shop to order, and get them in, and four weeks in quarantine.
But meanwhile I have to get out there with the weed-whacker and prepare the area (removing weeds around the extant juniper) for Jane to do some bush-planting today.
At least it’s turned off cooler today. Clouds have moved in, and it may rain, northwest style, which involves 30 minutes of drizzle every few hours.
Just out of curiosity, do you share Oregon weather? I lived in Portland for a year, and it rained a lot. And rained. A lot. I had a visiting friend point out that the grass had mold. I remember one (1) thunderstorm, all year, which occasioned the bulk of the conversation at work the next day. I assume in Oklahoma (it was Oklahoma, right?), you had massive thunderstorms — do you not get to see them anymore? Do you miss them? I always enjoy a good thunderstorm…
Only when rain sneaks up the coulees. Usually our flow comes from over the Cascades: the rainshadow of the Cascades usually makes it pretty dry—but not always: storms out of Alaska will track that way in winter, and by the time they get to us are quite ready to cut loose again. Most of our summer rain, which is fairly sparse, comes up from the south, so, yes, much of it seems to come from across western Oregon and up. By fall we are back in the Alaskan flow again.
I’ll share our thunderstorms with you. We woke up to thunder (looks like rain but hasn’t so far), and the weatherman says we’ve at least 3 more days of storms with tornadoes scheduled for Friday.
Rosemary in Tulsa, Oklahoma
When we do drive south for some reason, we are always jittery and anxious entering the region of perpetual sun…until we find the prospect of a really good thunderstorm. We are happy as clams in water once we succeed in driving into it.
It’s the unending sunshine that makes me crazy. I grew up during a bad drought in Oklahoma, and I’ve never forgotten it. 10 days of no rain and I start watching the weather reports obsessively, daily, three, four and five times daily; and a really good thunderstorm is just delicious.
The tornados I can skip. After the F5 and the F3 missed us on the same day, we decided we had probably used up our tornado luck, having had 2 F3’s bounce over us the year before—spectacular, but nervous-making.
Are there any other kind of fish, snail, turtle, frog that will eat the algae? Can it be processed for food – as in space stations?
Jonathan
Well, it has great potential as a biofuel, and makes methane: some guy is working on biofuel farms. But unfortunately koi are omnivores. Pond snails, maybe, but I have a feeling they’d be little empty shells; frogs are bug-eaters. Turtles, maybe, but most that would do this job would also nip koi. It’s a koi-eat-snail world out there. 😉
Do you ever need to drain your pond? Someone suggested we put in a drain. Personally I can’t imagine anything less appealing than slogging around in cold water in early spring trying to clear drains. I think I would rather rent a pump to do the job! 😉
We have no drain. We’re about 4000 gallons, in a 15×20 pond with a 3′ pit at one end. We use a Savio system. We have a skimmer the size used by a 12000 gallon swimming pool, plus a waterfall filter, which is about the size of your ordinary oldfashioned trash can. We got a bit more height for it and the micro-tip forward it recommends by setting it on concrete building blocks, then piling dirt and large rocks around it, which makes a rock garden—it’s freestanding. It would look more natural if we had had a nook or bank to shove it into, but we are hoping some small trees will grow up around it and let it blend a bit better.
That filter has a knife-gate valve at the base, so we can very quickly drain off about 700 gallons, down to the bottom of the gate on the skimmer. Beyond that, it will not drain. This is a safety for the fish, imho.
For maintenance this fall, I’d recommend what I just got: the pond vac—and a motorized one. http://wwww.pondliner.com has really good service, it’s where we got our pond kit, they know their equipment, and right now they’re selling a decent pond vac for 200.00, on sale. There is a 300.00 model, which does not shut down and switch to drain every 2 1/2 gallons it sucks up, but I’m perfectly satisfied with the economy model: the 1-minute shutdown every 2 1/2 gallons means you have time to reposition and move the cannister. It sucks out hair algae, leaves, small pebbles if you don’t watch it. The koi instinctively avoid it while you work. And it’s easy to clean.
In the fall, do the following: 1) when it turns colder and starts going below freezing at night, switch your fish to Cheerios or wheat-only Hikari koi food, and feed only in the morning, as long as they have any interest in food. 2) get a pond heater to float and keep a ventilation (outgassing) hole open. 3) bottom heater optional, but we use one. 4.) take a pond-vac to the leaves and crud. If you have a lot of leaves falling, use of pond-netting might help you keep them out. Getting the leaves out will help your pond chemistry over the winter. You’d have to stake it around the pond. 5.) remove the pump and uv-light, shutting down for a frozen winter. 6) we installed a homemade fish-shelter. A 6′ ring of irrigation hose joined by a hose barb, and covered (we stitched it with fishing line) with sun-shade fabric. This prevents predators getting at your fish while they’re asleep. We had a raccoon and a heron make a try.
If you have any fish under 4″ in length when it freezes, winter that fish over indoors.
For water maintenance, test strips, alkalinity buffer (to stabilize ph) and Vanish dechlorinator are good.
I really, really recommend the pond-vac at pondliner.com. This one is priced at 200. A very common non-motorized one that doesn’t work well at all is 100. The difference is night and day. And hours and hours and hours of work. This one will move fist-sized stones: it’s that potent.
For maintenance, several 10% water changes are better than one big one: fish don’t like big changes in their water if they can be avoided. Drain down a bit, (a pond vac will do that for you if you don’t have a gate valve) and refill, buffer, dechlorinate, then do it again the next day or so, until you’re satisfied.
Thanks….this sounds a lot more sensible than drains etc. 😀
It’s all about chemistry: there’s a barley straw extract in a flat weird bottle that will help with water quality (bacteria to help break down decomposing stuff). I recommend that. Microbe-lift products are good. A scarecrow water squirter or powdered coyote urine discourages predators if you live near wildlife. And you’ll enjoy having a pond vac much more than you would enjoy a clogged bottom drain. I don’t know why they even sell the things, but then, I like wildlife IN the pond, like worms, bugs, etc, that are free fishfood; and a too-clean pond is a dead pond. Mine right now is a lively shade of brown-green, like a woodland pool, but the water is crystal clear and you have no trouble seeing the deepest part of the bottom (couldn’t before the pond-vac: it was deep in crud). The water lilies are sending up leaves. (take them out of their pots and bury their rootball in gravel: they survive the winter that way and get an early start on spring.
Plants suck up the phosphate that come in tap water and spare fishfood, and use it as fertilizer. It’s what fuels algae. The trick is not to use an algicide, which is hard on the fish, but to use natural means, like competition, to do in the algae, plus a UV light filter—pricey, especially the Savio model, but efficient: it kills algae spores in the water. Water hyacinth and lilies take the phosphate the algae would use for food, and are very efficient at it. So in general, avoid dumping anything into your pond except: 1)barley extract 2)buffer for the ph (builds in resistence to ph change) 3) Vanish dechlorinator. That’s all the chemicals you need to deal with. Algicide—do ANYTHING short of using that stuff: it kills everything at once, overpowers your filters, changes the chemistry, and threatens your fish with suffocation and kidney problems. Water hyacinth is a far better solution. Putting down a few small slabs of limestone (pavers, at Lowes) in the pond is also helpful for the alkalinity situation: the pond will dissolve what its water ‘wants’, ie, if it’s acidic, it dissolves limestone faster, and that solves the acid problem.
Happy to help: I went through this learning curve last year! And thank goodness I had some real good advice from pondliner.com on the phone or I could have made some big mistakes. Also, if you need a superbig liner, they’re who to go to: when they do a seam, it’s made with heat and it will hold forever. Homemade seams can have problems.
We have a couple of mini ponds in the backyard — old bathtubs buried up to their rounded rims, with the faucet area covered by a sealed-on plate. They’ve been there now for 35 years, and no sign of rusting through yet. These days they get very little maintenance and are all overgrown, functioning only as water source for birds, and other backyard wildlife.
But I used to put time into them and keep them clean, tried to keep the enamel white, etc., had goldfish, mosquito-fish, lilies, water-hyacinth, other aquatic plants.
I would do a thorough clean-out every year or two: net out all the fish into a tub, remove the lily-tubs into garbage bags, siphon as much water as possible, scoop out the muck and scrub the enamel. I was about done siphoning one time when I happened to walk down by the side of the house (lower than the pool-site), where the siphon-hose emptied in the driveway. There in the dirt, under a thin film of still-flowing water, was lying a small goldfish that I had missed! I rescued it and tossed it back into the tub, and it was fine. Always wondered what it thought about that 100-foot trip through the garden hose …
Poor goldfish! Lucky goldfish, that you found him!