Thanks all for your responses, water gardening can be such an enjoyable hobby.
Joann your pond has been an inspiration to my wife and I for many years, as I’m sure it has been to many other aspiring ponders.
Your Koi are the Lords of their domain, and as such I would fear for the well being of any small turtle who might try to take up residence in your pond. My guess is the Koi would probably initially treat a turtle like a water hyacinth and aggressively try to nibble his legs off. Sooner or later they would come to realize there’s no food value in him and leave him alone, but the real question would be if the turtle would ever get comfortable with all those big bullies around?
The only real problem I had with keeping turtles in the old pond was their propensity to wander off. Turtles can be somewhat territorial with each other as they get older and we had one (the one you see in the video) that decided he was King turtle and use to challenge the other turtles. His challenge ritual simply consisted of swimming up face to face with another turtle and rapidly waving his front feet in front of his face. No biting or anything like that. The waving seemed to be enough to send the other turtle swimming away like he saw a ghost. I guess it was enough to establish who was top dog of that pond because all the others eventually wandered off never to be seen from again.
Although our turtles never bothered our goldfish or koi, they did eat most of the small fry and tadpoles we caught and put into the pond. But I think even your big koi would probably do the same, wouldn’t they?
The biggest problem I had with critters not getting along in our pond was a perch that we had. He was quite small when we put him in, but after a year or two he grew to about 6” long. The problem was perch don’t eat fish food, they only eat live things. Well when he was small he was content to eat mosquito larva and any bugs that happened along, but as he got bigger there just wasn’t enough in that small pond to keep him happy even though we use to feed him a lot of worms and other bugs, but that only made him grow bigger. Eventually he started to turn on the small goldfish. Even the smallest goldfish were too big for him to fit in his mouth, but that didn’t stop him from tearing bits off their fins. One poor little fantail goldfish was his favourite target. We eventually had to catch the perch and released him into the wild. Live and learn.
So to answer your question, I don’t think a young turtle would be any threat to your beautiful koi, but I still couldn’t guarantee how well it would work out from the turtle’s point of view. However being the experimenter that I am, I’d sure like to see you give it a try. It would personally be a thrill to see some new pictures or video of your pond with a turtle happily basking on a nearby log, and know that maybe I had something to do with that.
J
To answer your other question, we already started our new pond last spring.
In fact we filled it up with water just in time to shut it down before freeze up last fall. I started a thread in the “Introductions” section of this forum entitled “Getting back into water gardening”, but as usual I have a video for everything and, if your curious, the best way to see what we have so far is check out this video.
Last year was an enormous amount of work with all the digging and cement work involved in building the courtyard area in which the pond is enclosed. This year promises to be a little more satisfying as we get to actually be more involved with landscaping and stocking the pond, and of course we’ll hopefully be able to relax a little more and enjoy the courtyard.
J
