In today's episode, we're gonna talk about beneficial bacteria, barley
straw, and the difference between a water garden and a koi pond.
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So we're going to kick start this with a question about beneficial
bacteria.
I got asked a question.
For those of you who don't know,
beneficial bacteria occurs naturally in all bodies of water.
In the pond, in natural bodies of water, I should say.
So I get the question from somebody who understands that,
they say, if it happens naturally,
if beneficial bacteria is occurring naturally in my pond, do I
really need to add more supplements to the pond of beneficial bacteria?
And my answer is yes, you do.
And I'll tell you why.
In a natural occurring body of water you might have one fish per
thousands of gallons of water, and you have inlets of new fresh water
being rushed in, and old water being pushed out, and that's happening.
So in an ornamental pond in your backyard,
we can't totally create that.
So you usually have a small body of water, a high volume of fish and so
the fish waste can accumulate in the pond, and by using the beneficial
bacteria into the pond, you help to manage that water quality.
So it's really that simple.
We're not doing it naturally, we're doing it at a level where
we're keeping it in our backyard, with higher fish rates.
And I'll tell you, for the first decade of my career,
I just did what I was told.
Put beneficial bacteria in the pond, and
I knew that the ponds that I was adding the beneficial bacteria
supplements regularly to, those ponds looked better than the ones
that weren't getting the supplements.
So that was kind of the proof that one looked better than the other.
But I'll tell you,
I really learned a lot of trade secrets in 2006 when I hunted
down an expert in the field in my area here in Southern California.
Guy's name was Bob.
I think he was probably 100 when I met him.
I'm not joking.
He was very old.
And we went around and we checked out some ponds.
He taught me some amazing secrets and
it helped me to develop our own line of professional strength water
treatments that we use today, almost a decade later.
So I would definitely tell you to be using the benefits of
bacteria in the pond.
And that's gonna take me to the next segue of barley straw,
cuz I get a lot of questions about barley straw, and
barley straw versus barley straw extract.
But I'm pretty sure, Bob was the one that brought barley straw
extract technology to at least North America.
They've been using barley straw for centuries in Europe to control
algae in big bodies of water, lakes and streams and inlets and so
forth, they just throw these bales of barley on the side of the pond,
and what happens is as the barley starts to decompose a natural
chemical reaction starts to happen, and it inhibits the growth of algae.
All natural, and it's kind of an off-gassing thing.
It's not like a systemic algaecide that you're throwing in the pond.
So when that barley disappears, we add more barley to go to it.
But I'll tell you, it takes about four to six weeks for
the barley straw to start to decompose and
that natural occurring chemical reaction happens.
But if you use the barley straw extract,
then it happens immediately.
The stuff's getting ready to work right now,
so that's why we kind of, we don't use barley straw that much anymore.
We just go straight to the extract.
And I'll tell you not all extracts are created equal.
Some of the barley extract smells horrifying and
I can't imagine you would ever want to put that in your pond.
But I'll tell you this, a good barley extract smells wonderful.
And this smells like something you might put in a home brew if you
were cooking your own beer up.
You just pour it in there and wait for a minute and
then have them, it tastes delicious and control algae at the same time.
But anyways, I'm going to end this with the tough question is,
what's the difference between a water garden and a koi pond?
I get asked this all the time and I'll tell you this.
A water garden, think back to the Egyptian days,
they were doing water gardening back then, believe it or not.
Shallow bodies of water, we didn't care about fish.
We only cared about the plant.
We put shallow bodies of water with waterlilies, with fertilization.
The water could turn green if it wanted to, we don't care, cuz
we wanted these beautiful flowers from the aquatic plants to grow.
We want tropical lilies coming out of the water,
blossoming these beautiful flowers.
There was typically a very flat bottom, usually no gravel, no rock,
nothing in the pond, just simply water gardening at its purest.
If you've done any travelling,
you've visited any botanical gardens,
you can go to Louisiana, they have amazing water garden display.
There fish are almost obsolete, there's nothing in there.
These huge amazon water lilies I mean it's really amazing situation.
If you go into the koi pond then, we have really deep water
because we want the fish to be able to evade predators and
swim down for exercise.
Typically you're gonna have a bold kind of bottom with a bottom drain
to collect sediment and waste from the fish.
And then we cycle it up to filtration.
Usually in a koi pond, you have a beautiful waterfall or
some kind of water feature providing oxygen to the pond.
In a water garden, there's usually no water feature happening.
There's no water spitters happening,
because we want perfectly still water.
It keeps the water warmer, and then the water lilies,
they typically don't like that moving water.
So the water garden's all about the plants, and the koi pond
typically doesn't have any plants at all, and it's all about the fish.
Now, I do believe the real question you want to get to
is about an ecosystem pond, which happened about in the 90's. Okay?
About mid 1990 ecosystem ponds
became very, very popular, with rocks and gravel and aquatic plants,
and waterfalls, and beneficial bacteria, but
that's gonna be a topic for another episode, because now you
know the difference between a water garden and a koi pond.
We're gonna end this with a question of the day for
you guys, I wanna know do you keep aquatic plants with your koi?
Tell me yes or no put it down in the comments right here.
And then tell me what your favorite aquatic plant is while you're
at it, okay?
You know how to get me to answer your questions,
do #AskThePondDigger in Instagram, Facebook, or
Twitter, and I'll do my best to answer them on the show.
Thanks for watching.
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