- Joined
- Jan 24, 2019
- Messages
- 36
- Reaction score
- 26
- Country
Greetings from WI! Have had pond (and my oldest fish) for about 20 yrs but this is the first winter Ive left the fishies outside. It was getting to be mid December and still warm so I thought - hey, we've had such mild winters lately, why not leave them outside this year. So then what happens - record cold polar vortex of -25 F several nights in a row! After some trial and error I now have a pond breather + a 200 watt deicer both running together + a sort of an improvised greenhouse structure over it.
This spring I'm going to be re-doing my pond - downsizing actually from about 800 to about 500 gals. It's a long story, the railroad owns half of what Ive been using as my back yard (as have the previous owners for the last 100 yrs.) and I need to vacate the space that's not mine.... which means removing the pond since its 1/2 on my land and 1/2 on theirs.
For my current pond, I was inspired by Celtic holy wells which are found throughout the British Isles and date back thousands of years .... I wanted it to have an overgrown ruin like look, and it sorta does now (this pic is from when it was first put in). I think the new smaller one will have similar kind of feel, except I think I want the water to enter via a gurgling spring rather than a big gusher waterfall - something a little more subtle and not so noisy.
Ive been having good results from the Matala Biosteps 10 filter which I willl continue to use - highly recommend those! One thing I like about it is that I can put in a real super fine filter pad on the end when I need to, which really is good at filtering out fish poop residue or the pollen from the pine tree. Or a charcoal filter to clean the water when it turns brown from pine needles.
Nice to have found a pond community! Had a local pond guru, but he went out of business yrs ago.
This spring I'm going to be re-doing my pond - downsizing actually from about 800 to about 500 gals. It's a long story, the railroad owns half of what Ive been using as my back yard (as have the previous owners for the last 100 yrs.) and I need to vacate the space that's not mine.... which means removing the pond since its 1/2 on my land and 1/2 on theirs.
For my current pond, I was inspired by Celtic holy wells which are found throughout the British Isles and date back thousands of years .... I wanted it to have an overgrown ruin like look, and it sorta does now (this pic is from when it was first put in). I think the new smaller one will have similar kind of feel, except I think I want the water to enter via a gurgling spring rather than a big gusher waterfall - something a little more subtle and not so noisy.
Ive been having good results from the Matala Biosteps 10 filter which I willl continue to use - highly recommend those! One thing I like about it is that I can put in a real super fine filter pad on the end when I need to, which really is good at filtering out fish poop residue or the pollen from the pine tree. Or a charcoal filter to clean the water when it turns brown from pine needles.
Nice to have found a pond community! Had a local pond guru, but he went out of business yrs ago.
