Water Gardening: The Pond is Coming Into Its Own, 0 by Happenstance

Happenstance wrote:
The Koi and the goldfish are getting huge and they do eat a lot. I buy the biggest/cheapest bags/boxes of general purpose food - the Koi sticks and the round pellets.

They eat a lot of Mimulus too....during the winter they keep it trimmed back to the pond's edge, but come Spring even they can't keep up with the rampant growth. They go through eating binges where they will literally eat all day and the Koi beach themselves onto the rim to get at the more savory bits. They make big slurping sounds as they munch their way around the rim. It is hard to estimate the weight of the big white Platimum Koi......but I would guess 10lbs each.

The gold fish started out as those 12cent feeder fish you see in pet shops. I actually paid 25cents for a few of them. They were about an inch long and I used them to test the water before adding Koi. All but a few of the 50 I started with are still with us, one got stuck in the skimmer sadly. We get a few babies each year, six from last year are turning from the baby brown coloration to gold, white, black mixtures.

I've lost one Koi to a hawk....it was so big he dropped it and left it to die in the sun. Poor fish. My Koi are all inexpensive throw-aways (from a collector's viewpoint), with the exception of two $$$$$ beauties I bought several years ago. The hawk chose one of those two pricey ones. :(

Love to see the Cannas start to come back each year....they get bigger and bigger and spread each year. Some are actually growing IN the pond after creeping off the back edge. I just got several small Bengal Tigers in a nice trade with a fellow DGer...can't wait to see them grow up.

For those of you thinking of a pond, still working on the balance, losing heart........this will give you an idea of where mine started. (The image is terrible, but you get the idea. This was 5 years ago, and 3 digital cameras ago......both pond and camera have come a long way!) Even though it is a terrible image, I can guarantee that the water really was GREEN from algae and BROWN from runoff of the newly planted bed at the back edge. In the upper right hand corner of the image was the start of the waterfall, I was still digging rocks out of the open space outside the back fence and the water color wasn't really that fun to see cascading over the rocks.