Water Gardening: I finally went to see the experts, 1 by fredrump

fredrump wrote:
Jeri,
Rick Warren who owns Pond Solutions is an experimenter who prides himself on his work. I always like to deal with people who like their work and are proud of it. Money takes a second step if you find someone like that. His background is really landscaping in NY state. They somehow wound up in Florida as so many of us do and he set up a similar business here. Some of his customers had ponds they wanted him to take care of. Not knowing beans about that world, he built himself a pond at his business and found out that it's not as easy as it looks but he sort of got a pond using the prescribed tools to do it. (Now I saw all kinds of ponds there, even salt water ones.)

So he got into the pond maintenance business by default through landscaping. But then those pesky customers wanted better, cleaner or bigger ponds and he started to build them too. He ran into many ponds built by other landscapers who then walked away from them. Realizing that pond maintenance can be business all to itself he started taking service contracts of existing ponds. He did it by the book with UV filters and whatever the POOL equipment businesses sold him. He found out that sometimes this doesn't work so well. When he was commissioned to find a solution to a particularly pesky pond and get the water clean, he tried all kinds of different approaches to the task. He claims that practically everything for ponds is only modified pool stuff. So he modified some more and eventually came up with what has worked for him every time.

His website at the 'pond solution' lists various testimonials and many claim that after trying everything else only resulting in failure, Rick got them a clear pond within three days without UV lights. I asked him if I can expect the same. He hesitated and said that every pond is different but that my water was in much better shape then the norm and that I should see an improvement pretty soon. He was right. Tomorrow will be three days and we'll see what I can see.
:-)

Brenda,
Today, I was in awe of all the fish in my pond. I have no idea where they all come from except that the tiny babies of March have grown up to be about 4 inches long already. Is that really normal? 3 or 4 months of growth? When I fed them there was a frenzy I'd not seen before when the water was murky. Are they just hungryer or can they see the food better? The little ones were especially aggressive in shooting for the food particles.

Fred
PS yesterday (Sunday) I wanted to leave a message for Rick before I forgot as one of the switching valves doesn't seem to want to switch filters. There was no urgency but Rick called me back from his vacation spot on Sanibel Island within 1/2 an hour. I apologized for bothering him but he said he's always at work even when he's not and not to worry about it. I remember many years ago when I had the same philosophy when I started my business. It works.