To salt, or not to salt?

[csdude55]

My pond is roughly 1,000 gallons, with 20+ goldfish, 3 or 4 pond lilies, and pickerel rush that's really too big for the pond, so I'm thinking about taking them out completely. I also have parrot's feather floating, but I have to thin it out every year... I thin it down to maybe 50 sprigs, and by the end of the year it's taken over!

I currently have a commercial filter, but my goal is to replace it with a bog next Spring. I wanted to do it this year, but... money.

I have a 30G indoor aquarium, and aquarium salt does it a world of good. I'm thinking about salting my pond, too.

I believe that my lilies would be OK, but the rush... I don't know. I doubt the parrot's feather would live, which is a mixed bag for me; I know it helps with the water, but it takes over so much that I don't like the look of it.

Salt should help clear up the inky looking water, though, and I think it would be much healthier for the fish.

What do you all think?

 

[mrsclem]

Goldfish are freshwater fish, not salt water. I used to maintain a salt level in my koi ponds but no longer do so. A salt water dip for disease treatment is ok but salt is not going to clear your water. Your pond plants will not appreciate it either. Either use a fines filter ( pump water into a basket with quilt batting) or use Koi Clay.

 

[BKHpondcritters]

Adding salt to ponds used to be a very common practice, but it has, generally speaking, fallen out of favor for a variety of reasons. First off, as you already know, most plants don't like it. Also, goldfish aren't salt water fish, so... I'm not sure it's going to help at all with water clarity - maybe it would? I really don't know, but the 'cons' in my opinion heavily outweigh the 'pros' (if there are any to be had)

As far as your plants overgrowing your pond - that's sort of what they do. You have to be ruthless with the pruners & just yanking them out when the aesthetics aren't to your liking.

 

[Lisak1]

Are you keeping a salt water pond? Then the standard answer here is "no salt".

Salting the pond used to be standard practice, but we're learning. Salt is a useful thing to have if you have a fish that develops an infection or parasites and needs a salt bath. But adding salt to the entire pond is having the opposite effect - the salt becomes less effective on the fish when you need it and the parasites are becoming immune to it. Kind of like overusing antibiotics in humans. Plus as you mentioned, at certain levels pond plants will suffer in a salted pond.

You add another layer of complexity to your pondkeeping with salt as you now need to measure salinity. As you know, you never get rid of salt in a pond, but water does evaporate, so you have to constantly keep that in balance. And getting rid of pond water becomes a matter of dumping instead of re-using it in gardens or potted plants. So that's just a few reasons why most in the pond world would also say no.

What do you mean by "inky" water? Remember this is a pond - not an aquarium so your water quality goals will be different.

 

[addy1]

I have never used salt and have real clear water, the bog and plants take care of that for me.

 

[Lisak1]

As far as your plants overgrowing your pond - that's sort of what they do.

I meant to add that as well - if you do any gardening at all, whether in the water or on the land, you spend half your life trying to get things to grow and the other half trying to control them! Just part of the whole process.

Removing those plants from your pond will have a detrimental effect on your water quality - you're removing a big chunk of your filtration system.

 

[Stephen Noble]

I vote no salt. Why do you use it all of the time in your aquarium? Do you keep brackish water fishes?

 

[poconojoe]

Agree, no salt.

Tell us more about your pond. How many gallons, how deep, what type of filtration, how many fish, what size fish, what type of fish, what type of plants.

Do you test your water? The liquid test kits by API are the standard. The test strip type are inaccurate.

If your water is murky, your filtration may be inadequate. It seems you may have plenty of plants which usually helps with filtration. So maybe your fish load is too large for the plants and filter to keep up.

A lot of us use a pea gravel bog full of plants for filtration. That's all I use now. I sold my two pressure filters and UV light.
When I added my bog, my water went from pea soup green to crystal clear in less than a week. It has stayed clear ever since.

 

[Mmathis]

No salt!

 

[brokensword]

 

[csdude55]

Tell us more about your pond. How many gallons, how deep, what type of filtration, how many fish, what size fish, what type of fish, what type of plants.

Do you test your water? The liquid test kits by API are the standard. The test strip type are inaccurate.

If your water is murky, your filtration may be inadequate. It seems you may have plenty of plants which usually helps with filtration. So maybe your fish load is too large for the plants and filter to keep up.

A lot of us use a pea gravel bog full of plants for filtration. That's all I use now. I sold my two pressure filters and UV light.
When I added my bog, my water went from pea soup green to crystal clear in less than a week. It has stayed clear ever since.

What do you mean by "inky" water? Remember this is a pond - not an aquarium so your water quality goals will be different.

I hope I didn't make things confusing, I'm trying to reply to @Lisak1 and @poconojoe together, since the questions are similar...

I built the pond about... 11 years ago? Give or take. I dug it by hand, the depth ranges from 2' to 3' (I hit rock while digging and couldn't break through). It's about 1000 gallons, but I ignorantly put it in a shady section of the yard with pine and oak trees providing cover.

I bought a commercial waterfall pump and filter from Lowes, and I know the filter is inadequate. It said "up to 2,500 gallons", but now I know that it's definitely not good enough. The water stays dark, and I can only see the fish when they come to the surface to eat. I might be able to see 6" down.

In the beginning, I added 4 or 5 goldfish and parrots feather in an attempt to improve the water quality. Then the next year I added pond lilies, and I think the pickerel rush was the next year. I also added cattails, but they were WAY too big so I took them out a year or two ago.

By now there are probably 30 goldfish. I didn't add any more, that's just from normal reproduction. They seem healthy and stable so I don't think the water has major problems, it's just black.

I definitely want to build the bog filter (I had posted about this a few months ago, and I'm pretty sure that both of you gave a lot of helpful feedback) but it's more expensive than anticipated, and with COVID destroying my income I had to push it off.

My aquarium has a single koi and a small oto (I know, you guys have pushed me to put the koi in the pond, but I'm hesitant until I know it's safe), but the sides and back stay COVERED in algae! I added some parrot's feather, but it never helped. My well water is slightly acidic, though, and adding baking soda (1/8 teaspoon with each water change) helped. But when I added aquarium salt it seemed to help a lot more. That's why I thought about adding it to my pond.

I'm attaching some pics (the 2nd is last year, the other two are July and May 2020, respectively). On my list of things-to-do are to dig out the sides and add more river rock to hide the liner better, then take out the water fall boulders and replace them with a water bog. I'm slowly rebuilding the fence all around the yard, and as I do that I plan to cut back some of the trees to bring in a little more light.

My take away from this, though, is to forget about the salt, and just leave it be until I can build the water bog.

 

[Lisak1]

Your plants look incredibly healthy - they are definitely getting enough nutrients!

If you were to scoop a clear glass or jar of the water, what would it look like?

 

[mrsclem]

Any chance you are getting runoff when it rains? looks like the back side may be right at grade.

 

[csdude55]

If you were to scoop a clear glass or jar of the water, what would it look like?

I'll have to check tomorrow or over the weekend, but I'm guessing that it would be cloudy with greenish / yellowish tinge. Like you said, the fact that everything seems healthy makes me think that it's not an issue of water quality, but just algae.

Any chance you are getting runoff when it rains? looks like the back side may be right at grade.

It's not, I think that's just because I was standing on the deck when I took that photo, so I was 3-4' higher than the pond. The back of the pond actually slopes away, so I built it up 12-14" on the back.

The front is only built up about 6", but I don't think there's an issue of runoff. I mulch the garden around it every year, and I've never seen any mulch pushed that way or anything.

 

[csdude55]

If you were to scoop a clear glass or jar of the water, what would it look like?

Here ya go, Lisa! I'm sure it's obvious, but the glass on the left is from the pond, the glass on the right is straight from the tap (well water).

As suspected, it has a greenish / yellowish tinge, so I'm pretty sure that my issue is with algae. Which is really just a cosmetic issue, I guess.