Hey, today we're going to talk about power outages,
pond predators, and aquatic plants.
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So I just got back from Northern California.
We went on a little business trip up there.
And I wanna tell you a couple of stories.
First of all, I visited a couple people.
I visited a pond store.
But before I was on my way home, I was sitting in the hotel and
I was trying to catch up on e-mails and questions and so forth.
And I get this e-mail from a Bou Tran and I watched the email pop up.
I checked it out.
He was upset because he thought his pond wasn’t functioning right.
He thinks he made mistakes and he’s not sure what to do about it.
He gives me a brief description and it was pretty short so
I sent him an email immediately and I said where are you located?
I had no idea where in the world he might be and
he sends me back an email immediately.
It's almost like we were texting, but via email on the computer.
He says, I'm in San Jose, and I emailed him back,
I'm in Fremont, and I says hey, I'm going home tomorrow,
why don't you shoot me your address and I'll see about stopping by
tomorrow morning and I'll take a look at your pond.
So this was a really interesting thing because literally he's 20
minutes from where I was sitting in my hotel room.
So the next morning I go out to Bou's place and
I check out his pond.
And I have to tell you, his pond was fantastic, super outstanding,
it was a real inspiration to me.
It's very formal, it's above ground, half-up and half-in.
He did a great job on the whole thing.
And I think he just, he's a little overstocked with fish and
he had just had some little routine maintenance things that he was kinda
not getting right.
And I just gave him a couple of pointers and
I'm really optimistic that he's gonna have a fantastic success
with a couple of little pointers that I got.
He was actually thinking about filling it in when I got there.
I was like, do not fill this pond in, it is really fantastic.
So a big high five to Bou Tran for
doing a really great job on his pond.
And if you want to mark your calendar,
I'm gonna be back up in Northern California on June 12th and 13th,
we're doing a little contractor event and
a retail event at Connie's pond and garden in Castro Valley.
It's a great store.
I would highly encourage you to try to make it out to the event and meet
me there and tell me that you've seen our Ask the Pond Digger show.
It will be really fun for me.
But let's get on to the questions.
The first question is from Sissy Murphy.
And I know her name comes up a lot on this show.
And I guess I found out that her father, when she was a young girl,
used to call her the question girl cuz she was always asking questions.
And she continues to ask really good questions.
She suffered a long power outage at her place, and so
she didn't have any circulation in her pond.
And she was a little nervous about it.
Just got her thinking like, hey, when is this gonna be a problem.
Now at the time of filming this, it's still winter where she's at and
so the water temperature is low.
They were in the 60s.
You know 60 degrees was the water temperature.
So when the water temperature gets really high,
that's when the oxygen levels start to drop
in the dissolved oxygen levels in the water.
So it becomes dangerous when a, you're over stocked,
if you have too many fish in the pond sucking up that oxygen and
if the water temperature is warm.
I'll give you an example, in July, like Fourth of July weekend,
everyone's going away, if we have any problems with power outage
in a pond, locally here in Southern California,
when it's 100 degrees, it is very problematic.
So in the winter you don't have to worry quite as much, but
let me give you a couple pointers.
If you can get a little battery powered air pump, it's a little bit
of air, it's not a lot, but you can drop in a battery powered air pump
and get a little bit of stimulation of the water column.
If it's like emergency status, what I would recommend that you do is you
turn on your hose, and you make it like rain, you spray it.
Just imagine squirting that water into the air.
And it rains down onto the pond and when all that water starts to pound
the surface of the water, it starts to get the oxygen exchange and
that's how you can immediately put oxygen into that water.
If you're gonna do it for very long of course you'll probably wanna put
in some dechlorinator depending on how your city water is and so forth.
But I think that's like an immediate thing to do.
Of course, getting a generator and plugging in your air pump.
If your life support system is down, that's one thing.
But, air is the most critical thing when you have a power outage.
So, we do get a lot of phone calls saying, hey,
they're gonna cut our power from 8 AM to 4 PM, and that's when I say,
you better just go get a generator if it's in summer.
In the winter I'm not so worried about it.
So I hope that answers your questions about power outages and
gives you some feel for that.
The next question I'm gonna move on to is about pond predators,
it's from Brett Ferguson from YouTube.
It's a pretty good thing, he loves Koi and
he's learning the stress signals of things.
And he wants to make his pond less vulnerable to the blue heron and
the egrets because I guess he has a water passageway or
a Greenbelt behind him, and
the herons and egrets are hanging out there all the time.
So, I'll tell you that there's the things that I've seen.
A lot of people say statues work really well of a blue heron.
You can move the statue around so it doesn't say hey that's obviously
a statue, that same blue heron hasn't moved.
Some people use alligator things and
there's not many alligators in California.
It might work for you in Florida,
I think the animals are a little bit smarter than you might think.
So if you're in Florida, you put some alligator stuff around
the pond, might keep them away, but not in California.
I think they're onto you.
I remember this one time, there was a kind of courtyard,
and he was having trouble with herons, and
he strung piano wire up pretty high in like this cross hatch pattern.
And you didn't really see it because the way the yard was designed and
there's a lot of trees and so fourth but that piano wire that you
stretched really tight around there kept the birds from coming in.
You see if you have a cover over the pond,
when the bird might land over here and walk under the cover, but
as soon as you come up on them, they're very scared.
So they want to take off and go straight up.
So, they're not likely to hang out under a cover because they
can't just take off.
If you have no cover, then they can just swoop right away.
So, a cover is really good.
There's a motion sensor sprinkler device called a scarecrow, and
they work really well.
The biggest problem I see with scarecrows is you gotta change
the batteries, you gotta stay on top of that, and if the pond's very big,
you might need two or three scarecrows to manage the pond I do
have a pond on our service route that is about probably 30 feet long.
And we have three scarecrows on there positioned at different areas,
so if the bird comes in, it'll blast him with a blast of water.
Probably the best thing I can advise you on is if you have a dog.
If you have a dog that patrols the backyard,
then the bird's really not gonna hang out and I know that's not for
everyone, but that's probably the best thing you can do.
Or maybe the best thing you can do is a combination of all the things,
maybe some piano wire, maybe some kind of cover, have the motion
sensor and have a dog and then you're probably pretty good.
Of course, the blue heron, specifically, they're professionals
at catching ugly brown fish and dirty green water, so when you have
a beautiful crystal clear pond with these amazing colorful fish
they are subject, so you should take some of these things and
work them into your plan to protect your pond from pond predators.
We're gonna move on to the final question.
It is from Ricardo Lemeli, I think I said that right and
he wants to know what's the best aquatic plants that he can use in
his bog filter to remove nitrates in the pond.
So, what I wanna tell you is we want aquatic plants that grow very fast.
Rapid growth is what is gonna consume those nitrates.
If they're growing fast that means that they're pulling
nutrients from the pond.
So think along those lines.
Louisiana iris, pickerel.
A lot of the low growing like let's say, pennywort.
I know pennywort's a very fast-growing, invasive plant.
You don't want it to get into your lawn.
You don't want it to get into your garden on the outside.
But, if you have it controlled in a bog filter where it can
grow very fast and you can thin it out as it starts to take over in
certain areas, very easily.
It's a fantastic plant for consuming nitrates in a bog filter.
So as I said, pennywort, parrot's feather, and things like that.
One plant that I think is highly underused, even by my own self,
my own company.
We don't use this plant enough, is the lotus.
Now the lotus is a fantastic plant for consuming nutrients in a pond.
And I'm gonna pause there while I talk about lotus,
because I cannot talk about lotus without thinking of a very good
friend of mine, Kelly Billing.
She's out of Maryland and I just opened this last night,
I wanna show you this cool little gift she sent me.
These are lotus petals, or leaves I should say.
And they've expired, and so she cut them out and
made this beautiful pattern with it.
And she's colored them,
and they're on canvas, so I'll be hanging this on my wall.
I think it's really a great gift.
Thank you very much for that, Kelly.
And I want to tell you something else about Kelly.
We're gonna have her a guest on one of our tutorial series this summer.
So we're super excited about that.
I'm gonna tell you what we're going to do.
We're bringing her out there to show you her qualifications.
She's co-author of a book.
She's been specializing in lotus as long as I've been in the business.
I mean, she's really dedicated to this.
Her company is called after the genus.
Nelumbo, I think that's how you say it, if I remember right.
That's the genus of the lotus.
And so her company is called that, aka The Lotus.
And so we're bringing her out here to Southern California,
and we're gonna film some different types of ways that you can introduce
lotus bogs to an existing pond.
We're gonna do a specialty tutorial video on you know,
how to do a bog garden or just maybe only a lotus bog.
And we're gonna go step by step and show you a tutorial and
it's really fun for me because she's gonna come out there and
it's gonna help me grow my lotus knowledge.
And I'm super excited about that.
So I'm gonna end today with the question of the day for
you guys on what do you want to learn about the lotus from Kelly.
She's gonna be here in a couple short months, and if you put down
your questions about lotus into the comment section down below,
we'll do the best to compile them all, and work very hard to make
sure we answer the questions in that tutorial series.
And the tutorial videos, okay?
So that's it for today, and we'll see again real soon.
Thanks for watching.
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