Lillies

[DebbieH]

Hi. Can lillies survive in a Kio pond.

 

[addy1]

If you can protect them. Koi love to root in the lily pots.

 

[sissy]

reason I had to build a lily pond because koi destroy everything in sight .They even ate all the trapdoor snails I had gotten 1 year .I thought I protected the snails by putting them in the upper pond but they would not stay there .

 

[Lisak1]

And I'll add the other viewpoint - we had a dozen big koi in our pond and they never bothered my lilies, or any of my plants for the matter. It seems to be somewhat of an individual matter! @sissy has a couple that will even eat frogs! When they were spawning they would sometimes tear things up a bit, but that was collateral damage. haha!

They do love to poke around in pots, so I always topped mine off with some rocks that were too big for them to move. The downside of that was it made my pots extra heavy. Once I had a chance to observe my fish for a few years, I stopped worrying about it as they weren't interested. And if you have a heavily rooted lily pot, it's a job to get them out of the pot!

 

[j.w]

@DebbieH
I have heard they will destroy any plant put in a pond but I only have goldfish so no first hand experience.
Goldfish can get a bit rowdy w/plants also but for the most part they do pretty good.

 

[sissy]

they have even caught 2 birds in the waterfall pond and birds were lucky I was there when it happened and now keep the water level low enough in the pond so they can't do it again.I have bird baths that are clean but birds seem to want fish waste water .Funny but once the water hyacinth takes off and grows to alot of them ,they seem to not bother with them .Maybe got their fill of them and got tired of them .I do not feed my fish often either .

 

[DebbieH]

Thanks for the reply guys. I was hoping someone had managed invent something simple that would stop my Koi destroying them.

 

[Jhn]

I have experienced both sides, my original pond the koi destroyed any plants that touched the water in their pond. I ended up building a separate pond for plants that fed into the koi pond, similar to what sissy mentioned.

My current pond (10,000 gallons) built once I moved is loaded with plants and has koi in it. In this pond there were no large koi in the pond initially for the first year or so, and I let the plants pretty much grow bare root in planting beds of pea gravel. So the plants pretty much became well established before the koi in the pond attained any size. Also, I have water celery growing around the rock edge of pretty much the entire pond, which the koi love to eat, but that stuff grows like wildfire, so they can’t eradicate even though they try. Currently, have a lotus, 3 different lilies in the pond that the koi leave alone. Don’t know if it’s the size of the pond or the fact that I let the plants grow like crazy for the first couple years before there were any large koi in the pond that made the difference.

 

[sissy]

by the time your koi get big enough there will be more than enough plants to eat on .My fish are just plain old fashioned bad