Well, this page is just beginning. That's because barely one week ago -- on 28 June 1998 -- I began the (hopefully someday) great gardening project at my home. As I said on the front page of this section, I am a newcomer to gardening. So, for now, please bear with me as I offer my tyro's observations and suggestions.
As time passes, I will add more features concerning gardening tips and suggestions, calendars of plants, etc. For now, take a walk in the beginnings of my outdoor experience. Oh, and wear waterproof shoes, because the initial endeavor is in the area of water gardening.
My Water Garden
I've always enjoyed waterfalls and fountains. I find the sound of running water soothing, if it's nicely "tuned" (as opposed to leaving the faucet on!), and I think waterfalls can be very nice, visually. A few years ago, I bought an indoor fountain that I really enjoy.
So, when my good friend Provost started talking about water gardens, I was interested. Over the last year, we've talked and planned, and last week I finally put some of the plans into motion. Here is the result of my first effort:
My water garden is very much a first effort. It is an above-ground pond, rather than one that has been dug in. I used a Key Largo preformed liner (capacity: 275 gallons) and surrounded it with sandstone landscaping bricks. As the bricks will not fit the irregular shape of the liner exactly, there is a space at the front of the pond (immediately behind the bricks that are against the gazing sphere you see at the bottom center of the photo) filled with soil and mulch.
Two pumps serve the pond. One, a 1,200-gallon-per-hour pump, runs the waterfall. I started with a 500-gallon-per-hour pump and had a pleasant trickle down the stair steps, but it took more power in the pump to give the fall the kind of sound it's designed to produce. A second pump, pulling 350 gallons per hour, serves a Green Machine biological filter (barely visible as a black box just beneath and to the right of the hanging plant). I use Supreme Pondmaster pumps; they have good reliability records and seem to offer a suitable compromise between initial price (they are more expensive than Little Giant pumps but not as costly as Oase machines) and long-term expense in terms of electricity usage.
My Learning Curve, and Initial Observations
Above or Below Ground
My preference would be for below-ground ponds. For the equivalent cost of the liner and many of the landscaping bricks, I could have installed a somewhat larger pond below ground by digging out the ground to the shape I wanted and then lining it with 50-mil or thicker poly liner. Not only are below-ground ponds more "personalizable," but I think they look more natural and immediately more attractive. However, there is a significant investment of time and labor required for a below-ground pond. With the help of my son-in-law and a good friend, we positioned the liner, arranged the bricks, built the pedestals for the waterfall and the filter, and had the hardware up and running within three hours of when we began work. I estimate that the three of us would have spent the better part of two weeks digging the pond, laying out and securing the liner, applying concrete to hold things in position, and the like. And we still would have faced a significant amount of time--and additional expense--in obtaining and laying flagstones or other stone facings to make the edge of the pond decorative and safer. An above-ground pond also offers just as many opportunities to use plants for decorative effect outside of the pond itself.
To Filter or Not To Filter
The books all say you do not need a biological filter if you aren't going to have fish. My plan is to have fish, though I've run into a snag in this issue. Still, I'm glad I bought the filter. The return from the filter adds a little more sound to the effect of the waterfall, a slower, steadier bass rhythm behind the fall's melody, if you will. Also, the bio filter is also very good at trapping debris and sediment, and the more of that I can get out of the pond the better the water will look.
A biological filter is really nothing more than a gravity-feed water container with objects at the top to trap debris and more objects at the bottom to provide a place for bacteria to grow. The bacteria, in turn, eliminate contaminants produced by fish and other dwellers in the pond, thus preventing the fish from poisoning themselves. Having pulled mine apart, I know it's possible to make a filter, and there are several books that show how to do so. If you're going to go with a manufactured filter, I recommend the Green Machine over the Tetra filters. Green Machines are easier to open and clean. Their disadvantage is that, being gravity-fed (the water sprays in at the top and runs out a hole in the bottom), you have to position the filter above the level of the pond. With an above-ground pond, that can take some ingenuity to dream up a way to camouflage the thing. Even the smallest Green Machine I've found--the 1,500-gallon one I'm using--is the size of a small laundry basket and, let's face it, black plastic is hardly natural-looking.
Pumps
Pumps force you to make a trade-off. Several, in fact. First, there is the trade-off of size and capacity versus price; as the gallon-per-hour capacity of the pump increases, so does the price, and significantly. The difference between a 350-gph and a 500-gph pump was about $20.00; the difference between the 500-gph model and a 1,200-gph one was $80.00. And the size of the pump depends on how big your pond is, how much water you need to move, and the pump's purpose. A pump running water to a biological filter can, and should, service the filter at a slower rate of speed than a pump spurring a projecting fountain or waterfall. With the filter, you want the water to move relatively slowly and so give the filter time to do its work. With the fountain, you want a pretty spray (I am not talking about those trickly little fountains that have tiny streams of water arching out of fishes' mouths, or cherubs' pouring jars . . . or other parts of cherubs).
Then, you also need to consider how many pumps you need. Everyone I've spoken with at two different water garden outlets insisted that one pump cannot drive both the waterfall and the filter effectively. So, if you're using a filter, you need a second pump. And, ~sigh~ you may need a second pump on your waterfall, too.
Waterfalls
They come in as many shapes and sizes as the human mind can imagine. Some are tiny, the size of briefcases. Some are enormous and require professional installation. Mine is a compromise on the side of lightness, while not sacrificing the thing I wanted the most, a pretty melody of splashes down a cascading stairstep:
(The little stone, by the way, says "DAD'S GARDEN," a gift from Courtney)
This waterfall is approximately four feet long and about two feet wide at its widest point. It is made out of fiberglass and one can carry it (relatively) easily under one arm.The sluice itself is between 6 inches and 1 foot wide and there are about a dozen separate steps in the stairway. The water enters at the top (no surprise there) and courses around a bowl at the top so that it doesn't splash directly down the center line of the waterfall but cascades from side to side of the sluice as it drops down. I really enjoy the sound of it.
Provost has a much nicer waterfall, but it's made of concrete and must weigh close to 200 pounds. It also needs two pumps to feed its two spigots, while the one above requires only one. 1,200 gallons per hour makes this a LOUD waterfall with a visually and aurally pleasing nature. The larger waterfalls can require 3,000 gallons per hour or more in order to look and--for me, anyway--more importantly, sound like waterfalls. So, my suggestion is that you talk to knowledgeable people about mating the pumps and the fall. Visit water gardening places and see what they have, and find out what size and type of pump(s) they're running on those falls. I've found the people at water gardening outlets uniformly helpful and actively interested in providing you with what you want.
The Green Meanies (or, Patience, Jackass, Patience)
The bane of all water gardens, from everything I've read, and an inevitability if you live in sunny climes. There are three things you can do immediately to minimize, and hopefully eliminate, the algae problem, so that you have clear water instead of dull emerald murk:
1. Make sure you have submerged plants. These are green plants that live entirely below the water line. Ananachris is the preferred plant; it's the leafy, stalky thing you see in most aquaria. It's hardy, it's relatively inexpensive, and it not only scrubs algae but provides shelter and food for fish and snails.
2. The books all say to cover between sixty and seventy percent of your surface area with floating plants or similar cover. In practice, it's nearly impossible to achieve this immediately, at least unless cost is no object. Floating plants aren't cheap and they don't cover all that much area individually; the four I have in my pond cost more than the rest of the plants (water and land) combined. Still, both for primary aesthetics and to control algae, you should strive to have as much of the surface area covered as you can.
3. Snails. They're also cheap, they're hardy, and they like to chow down on algae. I bought ten of them yesterday and the last time I looked, they were all merrily plugging away in various places of the pond, dining on what's formed on the surface of my liner.
4. Patience is a must. I had crystal-clear water until the day I added the bog and floating plants. Within twenty-four hours after I added them, I had a green bottom to my liner and a green tinge to the water. The explanation, according to the people at Nelson's Water Gardens, is that the pond is new and it must achieve a balance. In other words, it takes time for the ecosystem you're creating to figure out how far the pendulum swings each way. I've added pond clarifier and will report on how the balancing act goes.
Critters, Invited and Otherwise (Or, A Word of Caution)
~Long sigh~ This is where I'm having the greatest problem in my early efforts. Establishing fish or other aquatic animals in your pond is, I think, the area most fraught with possibilities for failure. Let me tell you my tale of woe:
First, one probably should not introduce fish immediately. The pond needs to be prepared for them--chemically prepared, I mean. You see, fish are different from people in an important respect: They deposit their wastes directly into the same medium they breathe and eat in. If you don't get the pond ready to support the fish, they can poison themselves. And floating fish aren't too attractive.
Therefore, you need to do what you can to establish beneficial bacteria in the water. Either you can leave the pond alone for a few weeks after introducing the plants, or your can "jump start" your system by depositing beneficial bacteria early on. I chose the latter path. A bottle of bacteria, readily available at water gardening centers, is inexpensive and easy to apply (a certain number of teaspoons per day for the first week, then weekly after that).
Also, you need to make sure the water itself isn't harmful to your fish. We treat our water to remove impurities and make it safe for our consumption, but the chemicals we use are not good for fish. Depending on your local water supply, your water may be treated with chlorine or chloramine. You can eliminate the chlorine simply by letting the water aerate for a few days; the chlorine will evaporate out. Chloramine, however, isn't that cooperative. My solution has been to get a product called Aqua Safe NH/Cl. It removes both chlorine and chloramine. A LARGE bottle is about $7.00 at most water garden centers. Application is easy, though you have to do a bit more calculating to figure out how much to use (I am eternally grateful to my oldest daughter for telling me that a teaspoon is equal to 5 milliliters).
Oh, and in computing your chemical requirements, remember that you typically deal with the surface area of the water, not with the volume of the water. My 275 gallons occupy about 35 square feet.
Okay, you've prepared the water. What kind of fish to add? That's a personal matter. I lean toward comets, shubunkin, and related variants of goldfish. They're faster and have more variants of color than goldfish, and both less expensive and lower-maintenance than koi.
How many should you have? The rule of thumb is that, properly balanced, you can support 1 inch of fish per 5 gallons of pond. What's an "inch of fish"? Discard the tail and the fins and you have the measurement, but what you really need to know is how long the fish will be at maximum growth--because fish grow. My pond can support 55 inches of fish. That doesn't mean I can have 23 2-inch comets; comets will grow to about 8 inches in my pond. My recommendation is start small and work upward. Oh, and expect to lose some along the way . . . or, worse . . .
The Unwanted Critter Problem. This is something the books I've read didn't cover in nearly enough detail, based on my experiences the first two days of pond management. I put a comet and a shubunkin in on a Friday afternoon. At 10:30 that night, they were swimming merrily.
At 8:00 Saturday morning, they were gone. Not just dead. GONE. As in vanished. Departed. Checked out. Away. Left No Forwarding Address.
I talked to pet store people and the consensus was that birds got them. Crows, bluejays, and kingfishers in particular like to roam about this part of Texas looking for ponds and sampling the fare kept fresh for them therein.
I bought a couple more fish Saturday. Sunday morning: No fish.
The water garden people believe, based on the fact that the fish are disappearing in nighttime hours, that my interloper is a raccoon, and they tell me raccoons are nearly impossible to guard against. If you know of any good way to handle this problem, please let me know.
My point is, the books don't give you an accurate feel for how predators may intrude on your pond. I live in a typical suburban neighborhood. We hardly have any squirrels, let alone major predators. And yet everything points to a raccoon. So, be prepared, and consider that while you may want fish, you may have to settle for less. I suggest you start with cheaper fish (comets, shubunkin, etc.). It hurts a lot less to go out and discover you've lost $10.00 worth of swimmers than an expensive koi.
Life and Beauty
But the real visual attraction of the pond should come from the plants, I think. I like a four-layered approach, which I'm admittedly still working on.
First, there are the underwater plants. These are more for the sake of utility than for aesthetics, but many of the underwater plants are attractive in their own right. I use my ananachris to conceal the pumps, and having them near (but not too near) the water flow makes them wave slowly in the pond. It isn't a strong visual item, but it does add overall appeal.
Second, there are bog plants--plants that have their roots underwater but that project up and out from the pond. You have a wide selection here, of both flowering and non-flowering plants. In my pond, I have dwarf bamboo, parrot's feather, and a stalky plant whose name I cannot recall (I must reread the receipt). I also have arrowhead, which is a blooming plant. Take a moment when you buy your bog plants and find out how deeply they need--or can tolerate--to be set. Some plants need 6 inches or more of water over the top of the container, while others (like the parrot's feather) prefer a much shallower depth. The crucial thing is to strike the right balance between enough depth to keep the roots as wet as they want to be, and not having too much depth.
And then, there are the floaters. That is, their leaves float, but the roots remain underwater. I have two types in the pond at this time: A lotus that actually raises its leaves out of the water, and a water lily called a Queensland Green Smoke variant of the Pamela (how's that for a name?)
This picture shows it closing for the evening, but it gives a truer idea of its color. Here's one with it fully open:
So, Where do I go from here?
As I said, this is a beginning effort, part of a long-term project. I'll add pictures and more descriptive paragraphs about the other plants, and tips and suggestions as I encounter and learn about them. As always, and particularly in my gardening efforts, I truly welcome your comments and suggestions.
The Laird's Water Garden
6 July 1998
Pond Information
- Pond Capacity: 275 gallons
- Pond Type: Above-ground
- Waterfall: 1, powered by Supreme Pondmaster 1,200-gph pump
- Filter: Green Machine 1,500 powered by Supreme Pondmaster 350-gph pump
Plant Life
Submerged Plants
6 bunches of ananachris in pots
Bog Plants
- Arrowhead (blooming; full/partial sun; requires 6-8" of water over top of plant)
- Dwarf Bamboo (non-blooming; full/partial sun; requires 1-3" of water over top of pot)
- Parrot's Feather (non-blooming; full/partial sun; requires 1-2" of water over top of pot)
- Sagittaria (blooming; full/partial sun; requires 4-7" of water over top of plant)
Floating Plants
- Colorado Lily (blooming; hardy; requires 4-8" of water over top of plant)
- Green Smoke Lily (blooming; tropical; requires 4-8" of water over top of plant)
- Lavender Lady Lotus (blooming; requires 2-4" of water over top of plant; leaves rise out of water)
- Queensland Pamela Variant Lily (blooming; tropical; requires 4-8" of water over top of plant)
External Scenic Plants
- Areca Palms
- Bachelor's Button
- Caladium (2 varieties)
- Colesia
- Crepe Myrtle
- Dwarf Yucca
- Hummingbird Bush
- Lantana (yellow and white forms)
- Majestic Palms
- Mexican Heather
- Salvia
