How To Get Sparkling, Clear Pond Water
By Pamella Neely
It's a heartbreaker: all the time and energy and money you put into your pond to make it a beautiful, restful place, and now instead of staring into clear water at beautiful fish you see... pea soup. Or strange long wispy strands of green goo attached to the sides of your pond.
What is all that goop? Well, the long strands of green goo are string algae. The stuff making your pond's water into pea soup is plankton algae. Algae are millions of tiny little floating plants (single celled plants) that thrive when they have lots of sun and food to grow on. Like bacteria, there is no way to get rid of all the algae (unless you want a sterile, dead pond). The trick is bringing it back into balance. For example, Its normal to have a bit of black algae on the sides of your pond and the parts of the pond pump, and its OK to have a thin film of algae on submerged aquatic plants. Your pond is a living environment, not a swimming pool.
So where do you start? Minimizing the sunlight that the algae gets will help. Water lilies are a good start. Ideally you might have placed your pond in a place where it gets partial shade for part of the day, but its probably too late for that now. Besides, you don't want to completely deprive your pond of light. A better solution is to stop feeding feeding the algae so much.
If you are adjusting the pH of your pond, you may be unsuspectingly adding another essential ingredient for algae: phosphates. Most pH adjusters contain loads of phosphates, a compound algae just loves. Switch your brand of pH adjuster. There are pond pH adjusters that are phosphate free, but you may have to go online to find them. Pond Care pH Down is one choice that's phosphate free. If the label doesn't say a pH product is phosphate free, it probably isn't. And if the internet retailer you want to buy from can't tell you what's on a product's label, you probably don't want to buy pond supplies from them.
Like all the recommendations in this article, just cutting off the phosphates won't completely fix your algae problem. You'll need to fight the goo on several fronts at once.
A lack of beneficial bacteria - the kind that lives in biological filters - is another part of your algae problem. As the good or "beneficial" bacteria play their role in your pond's nitrogen cycle, they consume the same nutrients that your algae does. So the healthier and the more beneficial bacteria you have, the less green algae can live.
If you've got a serious algae problem, look to your biological filter, how many fish you have in the pond, how much muck is on the bottom of the pond, and how much water circulation there is. At the very least, you're going to need to vacuum the pond to get out as much of the muck as possible - all that stuff sitting down there is algae food.
The next thing to address is your filter - if you really want to solve your algae problem, you're going to need more room to grow those beneficial bacteria. Part of that may mean getting a bigger biological filter. You should also go buy some over the shelf beneficial bacteria. Microbe Lift is an excellent choice, but there are many others. Adding the new filter (or keeping the old pond filter and adding a second one) will probably also help with water circulation. Those beneficial bacteria need oxygen, just like your fish. By the way - one of the saddest affects of an algae bloom is a big fish die off. The fish die because the algae has eaten up most of the oxygen in the water.
With a better pond filter and more water circulation, you may be able to keep all the fish you had before and more, especially if you're willing to clean the pond more often. Resist this temptation to get more fish. The fewer fish you have in the pond, the less of a bioload you're forcing on your pond. Fewer fish will mean healthier fish, a cleaner pond, and less work for you. Do keep in mind that every time you feed your fish, you're tossing more algae food back into the water. Feed lightly. Hungry fish will graze on the algae, too.
And fish aren't the only ones who eat algae. Once you've gotten the algae problem under enough control, you can toss in a few snails or a few tadpoles to keep the algae at bay. These creatures are sometimes sold as a "cleaning crew" by pond centers or websites. TheyThe tadpoles and snails will help keep algae under control, but they can't eat enough algae to turn clear up a green fog.
About the author
Pamella Neely writes about maintaining garden ponds for http://www.BuildAGardenPond.com. from http://www.FreeArticlesAndContent.com
|
|
Copy This Article
For FREE!!!
You can use this article and copy it on your own website
for free! All you have to do is make sure the article
is copied with no changes and includes the "About
The Author" text. Also please ensure that all url's
are hyperlinked according. Thank you. |
Link To This Article - And We'll
Link Back To Your Website!
You are more then welcome to link to this article! All
you have to do is copy this webpage address from the
address bar and create a link on your website. Please
use the title of this article for your link text. Please
get in contact once you have linked to this article
and we'll link back to you! Thank you. |
|
|
|
Other great articles from this category...
|
Related Sites
|
|
