Pond Plant general Maintenance

11/02/99 Pond Plant Maintenance by Werner rev 11/08

Overview

Pond plants, although much less work than terrestrial plants, must be maintained, just like your landscaping plants.

Any dead leaves and blossoms should be discarded before they sink below the water surface to create more anaerobic sediment and use up valuable oxygen. Root bound plants should be divided and/or repotted before they split the pot and release soil, fertilizer and anaerobic bacteria into the water.

Plant Media

We have been experimenting with soil less medias for lilies but find them to be a waste of money, as they will eventually silt up with sediment and lose their porosity. Our medium of choice for bog/marginal plants is 1/2to 3/4" river rock in an aquatic net pot. This allows water circulation and for a while, and stops anaerobic conditions.

Lilies, unfortunately, tend to do poorly in this gravel potting system without massive Koi/fish stocking levels fertilizing the plant. Our lilies are potted in squat aquatic pots with no holes mixture of 1/2 sand 1/2 topsoil--we stopped using composted cow manure, as well as aquatic tablets, once we found the NEW once a year fertilizer, with a poly coating that is activated by soil and not water. If your pond lacks planting shelves a food alternative to holding Bog and Lily pots are Clay Chimney Flue liners. They come in various sizes so you can fit all types of pots.

Plant Benefits

Bog/Marginal plants do help to maintain better water quality by virtue of their roots absorbing some of the nitrates. Our potting systems described above, further increases their filtration action. Lilies, being potted in soil and being heavy feeders will actually add a little to the bio-load of the pond. Their main benefit is shading the water surface preventing some algae growth, giving your fish a sense of security and keeping the pond water cooler.

Fertilizer Primer

Fertilizing plants presents us with some problems. Even though some people use commercially available fertilizers i.e. Jobe's tree spikes, Miracle grow, Osmocote etc., we have found these can release fertilizer into the water column too quickly, since they are specifically designed for soil that has wet and dry cycles. This can create green water and algae blooms in short order. If you're using these, make sure your aquatic pots are solid and have no holes on the bottom. This will prevent most of the fertilizer leaching out into the water column.

Planting Depth

There are optimum planting depths for every Aquatic plant. the chart available here gives a visual representation of these depths.

In Our Experience

Of the 8 ponds we maintained at our showroom, 2 of them were plant less holding ponds. The fish in these ponds did not have the brighter colors of their mates in planted ponds. We routinely sent our store kept fish out to our outdoor planted ponds for two weeks of R&R , afterwards, their colors show a marked improvement no doubt due to feeding on color enhancing algae. New shipments if fish seem to feel more comfortable in the planted ponds, they very rarely try to jump. In our latest pond addition at the store, we kept Lily Marleen, a 20' Ogon Butterfly, for 2 weeks without plants. She hid in the corners, dashed about madly at any sudden noise or movement. After we introduced some water lilies she swam regally around her domain with no signs of the previous skittish behavior.