Tag Archives: pond

Clean Inflow Ensures a Sparkling Pond

When operating properly, a pond will have good water volume and adequate exchange, or overflow, to ensure against stagnation. When the inflow goes awry, a pond will have either too much water or too little, and become dark.  Suddenly you find yourself constantly cleaning a muddy yard and the pond smells.

 

The most common problem with water inflow is lack of sufficient water to sustain pond level. Sometimes, heat or drought causes this problem. Most of the time though it is because the pond was not built so that it was level in the first place. Leaking can also be caused by cracks in the outdoor ponds concrete walls and plastic liners.

 

Since it’s easier to add water than to unearth, resituate and then repair a leaky basin, finding a solution for a pond that seems to have low water level usually begins with looking for a way to supply a supplementary water source. Even if the pond does leak, a fresh source of water may help the pond look cleaner.

 

However, before you consider adding a supplementary water source your best course of action is to make sure that your existing inflow pipes are not just clogged or cut off.  They get clogged with silt or debris.  Evidence that this is the culprit is soaked water or a wet patch around the surface edges of the ground.

 

Your inflow pipes can also crack or burst if they freeze during the winter. A pipe buried below frost line will run in cold weather, as long as the pickup source doesn’t dry up or freeze.  This is why most landscape architecture technologists recommend using PVC pipe. It does not tend to expand or contract like copper piping or crack like certain types of plastic pipes.

 

You can save yourself a lot of maintenance in general by making sure that your inflow pipes have a direct path to the pond. The less elbows, twists and dips that the water has to flow through, the less likely it is to become clogged.

 

If the problem is silt, you might try building a small silt basin (dug into the pool) just upstream of the pond to catch silt before it reaches the pond. This pocket can be cleaned out as needed, by hand or machine, without disturbing the pond.

 

If no supplementary stream or well is available, pond owners sometimes cut drainage ditches in the watershed above the pond. The ditches are usually filled with stone over perforated plastic pipe.

 

If your pond is located in a wet damp hollow you may have not choice to relocate it. You also may have built your pond just below some kind of watershed, which also might be cascading toxins from the earth into your pond as well. This can definitely result in the loss of your precious koi. Depending how much of the flooding in your pond s caused by seepage beneath the your only choice in this situation might be to relocate the pond!

Taking Care of Your Pond Through the Fall and Winter

There is a tendency to think that there is nothing much to do to your outdoor pond in the winter and that you cannot spruce it up or make it look better.  Your pond does not have to have a dormant, unattractive phase until the sun shines. There are things you can do to maintain it and enhance it so that it is nice to visit all year round.

 

Leaf netting is a pond owner’s best friend.  Before the leaves fall in the autumn cover the entire pond with leaf netting. It is much easier to keep the leaves out than to remove them after they fall into the pond.  Do this early and you will also save your pond from looking like a disaster area in the Spring.

 

Remove tropical or annual plants from the pond as they will decay and pollute the water.  This will leav you looking at a mucky mess all winter and it is just not necessary. It is also not good to leave leaves in the pond with any wintering fish and if there is a lot of plant matter settling to the bottom of the pond then it can actually raise pond levels and flood your yard.

 

This is a good time to divide some types of aquatic plants (waterlilies and iris) and place them back in the pond.  It is not necessary to wait until Spring.  You can also cut back the foliage on hardy perennial plants and lower the pots they grow in to the bottom of the pond.

 

Your cue to start winterizing the pond is when the temperature drops to forty degress Fahrenheit. This means it is time to turn off the pump for the winter. If you have fish turn down the water flow on the pump. Keeping the water flowing through your biological filter allows the bacteria to live therefore ensuring good water quality when you increase the pump’s water flow early in the spring.

 

You can add a floating de-icer to keep an area free of ice. This opening is necessary during periods of ice cover to allow an exchange of gases throughout the pond that it does not become stagnant.

 

If you like, plant Water Hawthorns, which are a mainstay in Japanese ponds. This gorgeous plant blooms through the ice. They are an opposite growing cycle to most plants and grow and bloom fall through spring and go dormant in the summer.  They help keep the water oxygenated throughout the cold winter months.