Fish pond

Well it is that time of year again the annual cleaning out of my pond, This usually involves getting rid of old leaves and other detritus that has gathered over the winter period and generally checking the condition of the fish. This year sees me trying a new Ultra Violet light set up which I hope will control the ongoing algae war. I have decided to try a remote UV filter in order to be able to clean the glass tube the pond water runs outside of. The UV light sits inside the glass tube and emits light all the way around it's circumference.

New filter and pump for the fountain

As you can see from the next picture the water quality is pretty poor. In addition to the new UV filter I will start to slowly add fresh water and remove some of the old winter water. As long as this is done a bit at a time no issues with chlorine should occur. My hosepipe also has a jet option on the trigger an old hand told me that blasting the water in takes out some of the chlorine as well.

After building the pond I rushed of for all the various treatments,ph testing kit,chlorine neutraliser, and a tonne of other stuff. Reading all the various booklets came up with the same method for working out your ponds volume. length x depth x breadth to find the volume of water. As I had built slopping sides this would not be an easy task. I found a gallon can and set my hosepipe at full volume when it was filled I noted how long it took to fill a gallon . I timed how long it took to fill the pond and that gave me the total volume of the pond. For information purposes the pond holds 1,500 litres or 333 gallons

I was going to take the plunge and ad a heater this winter and keep the fish active, I was more or less committed to doing it after last years winter when for the first time I lost some fish due to a very cold spell indeed. Problem is I like the seasonal nature of the pond and spring time sees the guys very active. Usually with the water change and general spring clean they will get a bit amorous and start chasing the females around the pond. One year we had hundreds of fry but none survived. Never found out why I even put some in separate tanks. Well I will leave it there on this hub as I would like to post some more as the water clears up and the eternal mating game starts again. One more thing is watch out for the annual sweet corn feeding frenzy when the will literally jump out of the pond for the stuff.

A few flowers never go amiss around the old pond and they usually attract small insects and flies which the fish will take off the surface. Given the choice I would prefer the fish eat all naturally occurring food sources but the old carp sticks have to be used to supplement their daily intake. Sweet corn literally drives them wild and they can never get enough of the stuff. The big drawback with sweet corn is that the outer coating on the corn does not get digested and ends up making a heck of a mess. I am lucky that we have a drainage manhole very near the pond and a clever little water hoover device is employed to clean the bottom. This works by means of the syphon principle and requires no power or other means of activating it.

Bought a new camera this week it is a Fujifilm FinePix S2950. Never been one for photography really and my camera on my mobile has always been good enough for me. My recent visit to Shibden Hall museum showed up it's lack of features, Although that was mainly due to the poor flash. As I plan to do some hobby photography I thought I may as well take the plunge. It looks very much like an SLR camera but is not. After practising taking pictures of the fish feeding and attempting to catch the fish actually reaching out with there mouths I found the feature which allows multiple shots to be taken in succession. So here they are although I have not perfected it yet.

Buzz words are something that really annoy me, Must be my age. Although we have had the pond for a lot of years one thing I never considered was using the pond water for growing plants with. Last year saw me trying my hand at growing some tomatoes. As my competitive edge kicked in I wondered how I could give my toms a head start. Usually Mrs G will water her plants from the normal hosepipe, I decided to try some of the old pond water on the tomatoes and the results were staggering. I know it makes perfect sense that nutrients are bound to be plentiful in the old pond water. And so we ended up watering all our house and garden plants with the stuff. I usually scrape the side of the pond as I draw water out and this usually fills the can with a fair amount of green algae. Well whatever it is it's good for growing plants with and I highly recommend it to would be pond builders.

One of my rush decisions was to purchase two albino Sturgeon this week. I had figured on buying some fish which would keep the ever present algae at bay. Turns out they do not eat algae. After some internet browsing they appear to be fond of prawns among other things. I am going to buy some special sinking food for them. Night time sees them very active. One unusual activity seems to be trying to leave the water. I will add some video of them now to let you have a look.