Water Gardening: Planning My First Pond... Any Advice?, 1 by bsavage

bsavage wrote:
How exciting!!! Now for plants and fish! I have loved everything I've purchased from Texas Water Lilies, however, the co-op for them just ended, which is too bad because they have great water plants and lilies and great prices. They may have another co-op through DG in the next couple of months. As for fish, one of the best bits of advice that I recieved was from one of my favortie DG friends and ponder, who recommended that before adding any expensive koi or other fish, that you go to petsmart or petco, and get some feeder goldfish. Put them in the pond first, to make sure all levels are safe and that they thrive. For us, our worst lesson was in bad information from the pond store, that big pump that we got was unenclosed, and sucked up "waste" from the bottom, through an impellor. They not only never instructed us to enclose it in a cage, after the worst happened, they really couldn't imagine that it could happen. I called the company that manufactured it, and they indicated that yes, that pump could suck up any solid waste, including (sob) fish. Tony then built a cage for it, and it's been fine ever since. But I hope our experience with a pond store that knew nothing about what they were selling ultimately helps prevent that kind of a tragedy. After things were good, we bought 100 unculled 2 - 3 incho koi from "exoticfish" on ebay. (That is their ebay name). They shipped overnight, sent 117, they all arrived in perfect health and survive very well. The very few that we lost several months later were apparently due to a house-sitter mistake.Most of them are now 10 - 12 inches or bigger!!! If you want to see the story of our pond building journey, here is the link: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/705479/

And a pic of it late last summer. The pond and it's surrounding gardens are just starting to come back to life now, so you get last year's pic for now.