Re: NANFA-L-- Pond construction

Prizma at aol.com
Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:06:31 EDT

yea... dogs and ponds dont mix! he just gnawed on the cypress knees eh?
maybe you didnt feed him enough! :)
we had an adopted dog for awhile... she got to jumping the fence and would
rake havic on all the plants. kinda glad that hyper beast dissappeared.
one smaller planted starhead pond i had the neighbors dogs got to visiting
it regularly and wallowing in it. anacharis strung all out the sides in clumps
and my fish flipping on the banks. i got me a electro fence and strung it up
around the perimeter. the dogs got inside and then could not get out! they
were like yelping pinballs richecheing inside... yelp yelp yelp!

i had a bad run of filamentous algae... very green hair algae... in the
spring but it has thankfully dissappeared. it was smothering everything! you
could wind up great big globs of it like speggetti. i dont know what made it
dissappear. it could be the herd of stonerollers i have. they are big and fat.
not too sassy.

over a year ago i had this very gross floating globs of brown crude algae.
when it rained it would sink. when i was hot it would float to the surface.
nasty. i would dipnet it out but inadvertantly also dipnet topminnows and
sorting it was messy work.

the salvation to the brown crude algae was the hatching of hundreds of bull
or green frog tadpoles. they loved the stuff and within a couple weeks it was
gone! amazing.

that is why i say pond keeping is an ongoing experiment. things are always
changing! dont fuss to much, roll w/ it and watch and work for improvements.

i still say extra filtration in needed tho not required. and plants are
great living filters indeed. tho if you want the water to stay clear... you need
to circulate it though some kind of filter media.

i used 7 trucks loads of tn river peagravel in the partioned shallow end
under plumbed w/ perf french drain plastic piping. in a typical small pond a 55
gallon drum filled w/ lava stone would be cheap, easy, benefitial and
excellent i think. supplement this w/ all kinds of plants and you will have awesome
water quality and clarity.

:)
casper
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