New to garden pond

[Koiqueen]

Hey! I have loved fish all my life. Started out with the fish bowl and common gold fish when I was very young and now I have a 1000 gal. Pond with a mixture of gold fish and koi. Just so you know a little of my background with my pond I started out with a small probably 200 pond just to see how things went. I loved it and wanted something bigger so went to the 1000 gal pond and struggled with algae till I was blue in the face and ready to give up. Then I came across an article one day about a bog garden. So I did a little research and started the construction. A year later I went from bio filters and media filters and every other thing I tried to keep my water clear to my bog garden being the only means of filtration I have now and my water is crystal clear.

 

[Mmathis]

Welcome! We have quite a few "boggers" here on the GPF, and sounds like you share similar stories of crystal clear water. In fact, I'm in the process of constructing a bog. Where is Summit, MS? My hubby is from Hattiesburg.

 

[Koiqueen]

Good luck with your bog. Summit is about an hour west of Hattiesburg .

 

[addy1]

To our group. I love my bog, it is my only filter. Never have green water, algae, murky water.......well unless I mess it up. Just love the plants that you can grow in it.

This is about mid summer, bog water falling into the pond.

My pond was murky and a little green upon startup just a few days ago, within 12 hours it was crystal clear again. I had to get my net up since mr heron was flying over and now could see the fish in the pond.

 

[Carolyn22]

Very nice. We have bogs into our pond as well. Hubby runs a small pump through the larger of the bogs. This keeps the water clear and fresh. One year, he thought he could get away with not running that pump - I believe at that time we were not sure how much good that pump was doing through the bog and trying to cut down on our electric bill. Anyway, we found out the hard way how important that little 500 gph pump through the bog really is.

 

[j.w]

Carolyn
Do you have some pictures you could share w/ us of your pond?

 

[Carolyn22]

Love all of your pictures -

Addy, I really like your bog garden photo. I wish mine was as nice as yours.

We planted water celery into our main bog. Boy, was that ever a big mistake! That stuff has really taken over. In all honesty though, water celery has a nice fibrous root system, so it does do the trick to filter the water.

You can see my main bog in the far part of the 1st photo.

JW - trying to add photos tonight, but having difficulty uploading photos -Is anybody else having this difficulty as well?

 

[CountryEscape]

Welcome, KoiQueen!!! I have a bog on each of my ponds, larger one of the pond I dug last spring, and totally agree they are wonderful in keeping the water clear.
Carolyn, I sometimes have trouble. Just either keep trying, or walk away for 10-15 minutes, then try again. If they don't load pretty quickly, I always think either GPF is running slow, or my internet is.
You mentioned "water celery" ... did you maybe mean water "parsley"? It looks very similar to what I have that I thought was parsley. LOL Mine is varigated, though, and doesn't grow as fast as yours. Your climate is probably more favorable to your plants, too! Great pics! Now, thin out the plants you don't want, and maybe see if other local ponders are interested in some. Or, if you are into Ebay, you could probably sell a bunch of it on there. People are always looking for good deals on pond plants. Good luck!
A question to both of you ladies (KoiQueen and Carolyn): Do you have water running INTO the bog, or just over the top of it?

 

[Koiqueen]

I pump water from my pond through a pipe that runs in the bottom of my bog. Lava Rock is about 6 " thick on top of pipe and then pea gravel about 8" thick on top of that. My plants are planted in the pea gravel. So the water just filters up from the bottom and flows over back into pond. I will try to post pics soon.

 

[j.w]

No problem here loading pix but as CE stated sometimes it is slow and they take awhile to load. I can see your nice pond photo's tho nice and clear! I have some water celery and noticed it is just now trying to make a comeback. Hope it does as I like the way it looks. Its the variegated kind. Mines just planted in between the rocks around my pond w/ their feet in the water. So it's good for water quality eh?

 

[mtpond]

Welcome.

 

[Carolyn22]

CountryEscape -

you may be correct in that it is water parsley and not water celery. Either way, it is quite invasive. I had not thought about putting it on Ebay and that is a good thought as I have been thinking about selling again on Ebay. I did do well with that quite some time ago. Right now, hubby is in the hospital, so everything has been put on the back burner.

The water is pumped into the bog with a 500 gph Pondmaster mag pump. The hose coming off the pump into the bog is buried into the pea gravel in the bog, so the water does go through the bog, but not up from the bottom of the bog, which KoiQueen's does. I would think her set up would really be ideal. The roots from the water celery/parsely (as I type, I am thinking the flowers are similar to those of the parsley in my herb garden) are fibrous and do a great job of filtering out the fish wastes and whatever else needs to be filtered out.

The fish love to eat the water parsely and it is funny when they are eating it. They act as though they have little feet and are bracing their feet on a floor to gain leverage to pull out bits of the plant and eat it. I find stems and such stuck in the waterlilies and often in my skimmer.

JW - I kept getting an error message on the photos, which I did get before. I know if I got to Firefox instead of Google Chrome, it does seem to be a tad better.

 

[kougs]

ok, here's my usual statement.

Go back, Go back, it's a trap!!! :razz:
:goldfish:

 

[j.w]

Guess it is called both Water Celery or Water Parsley: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/31431/

I am using firefox Carolyn and back awhile ago I got those error messages too and found at that time I had to reduce the size of my photo's before I could get them to post. I think addy had the same problem at that time too. Then when Ian did a fix on it they now all load and I don't have to reduce them.........using firefox tho, don't know about any other browsers as I don't use them.

 

[CountryEscape]

Oh, I bet it's the size of the photo. Check that before you try to download. If it's over a certain maximum (I think it tells you when you're loading the pics) then it won't let you post them. I always reduce the size of my photos to 35%, as they way they download to my computer it too large to post. I use Microsoft Picture Manager or something like that. I've just gotten into the habit of doing that resizing, so it doesn't take so long.
Here are some pics of the piping I did when I built my bog in the goldfish pond. I'm posting them so I can see the size of the pics. LOL Looks like mine are down to between 144-231 KB. I know they can be larger.