Welcome, everyone.
Today we're gonna talk about recycling your pond water,
how long you should quarantine your fish, and the pros and
cons between a dedicated Koi pond and an ecosystem pond.
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All right let's do this.
Mike Cordello from San Diego, he wants me to share some water
recycling tips because he's in San Diego, California.
And in California we are suffering from a very long drought and
he still wants to get a Koi pond, but he's really concerned about
water consumption and how much the cost might go up to.
So here's some recycling tips for you, and this kind of
goes along with some of the other shows we've been shooting and
pushing out the content for.
When you're doing a water change on your pond,
how cool would it be to take pond water and send it to your garden,
to the tomatoes in the summer time.
And then, instead of sending fresh water to the garden,
you can add water to the ponds.
So, that's like a water change deal.
If you take the time right now in construction when you're building
the pond out, you can make provisions for
water changes very easily for backwash, back rinse,
draining of the waterfalls, and these different things.
If you're gonna go into that level of construction, you could work it
in right now where you could send water to some gardens and
you could flood the gardens.
If you've followed the how to build a Koi pond series that we have on
YouTube here, we do the backwash rinse cycle and
send all the pond water over to the bamboo along the back fence.
So when we backwash, we send that nutrient rich water to the bamboo.
And then we put the fresh rich new water into the pond and so the fish
are benefiting from the new water with good elements and the bamboo's
getting all the benefits from the nutrient rich stuff.
Now I do wanna say if you're gonna make provisions like that to recycle
the water, repurpose the pond water to the landscape and
then put the fresh water into the pond.
We wanna make sure you're not using algaecides in your pond.
We take the real natural approach,
we wanna put all natural products in the pond.
I said it before, if I can't put it in my coffee,
I don't really wanna put it in my pond.
So if you're using any heavy algaecides
in the pond to manage water quality and
algae, then you're not gonna wanna send that to the garden.
You wouldn't wanna eat tomato filled with algaecide
that you used in your pond.
So, you're gonna wanna make that
very clear when you're doing those kind of things.
I do wanna say that cuz he's worried about the drought.
So, I can tell you that a pond takes
less water than the same area of sod.
And typically when we're landscaping around our pond, we'll set a lot of
rock work outside the edges of the pond, and then you can put drought
tolerant plants around the area to enhance the look of the pond.
So you can take an area of grass and do a beautiful water feature
with little evaporation and then you can do all the plants
around the sides of the pond with rock work and statues and so forth.
So I think you can save a lot in water
in the same area of landscape if you do it correctly.
Now, I wanna make sure you do the pond right and
make sure you hydrotest the thing before you get started so
you don't have any leaks in the pond.
Cuz a leaking pond is probably gonna be worse for you.
So, make sure if you're gonna have it professionally installed,
the guy is highly qualified and you check it for
leaks when the pond's complete.
And if you're gonna do it yourself, just take your time and
do all the necessary steps and you're gonna be real fine.
So, the best thing I can tell you is recycle the pond when you do those
water changes recycle the water to the landscape,
keep it on the property, and put that fresh new water in there.
I'm gonna move on to Phillip Butts on YouTube.
And he is responding to our quarantine video.
We talked about quarantine protocols in one fo the early shows
of Ask the Pond Digger.
And he wants to know how long we quarantine Koi
before introducing them to the pond.
He tells me he has some quarantine processes, and
he likes to put the fish in an aquarium and
watch it closely before he adds it to the pond.
What we do at headquarters here when we bring in new fish,
we quarantine everything for three weeks and
we took classes under Vicky Vaughn over in Georgia.
We actually had her come out and
teach us some quarantine protocol classes.
And so we quarantine everything for three weeks before we set it free.
And we are doing specific pathogen free fish.
They don't have these particular pathogens.
And we can reassure that because of our quarantine protocols
and process.
So when we go through the process,
there's certain medications we can add to the water that can kill
undesirable parasites that you might introduce to your pond.
And it kills them, but then the eggs can last a certain length of time.
I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think it's ten days.
So the eggs can last around ten days, and
then we do another treatment and then the eggs could hatch out and
then we get them at that end as well.
So the right quarantine protocol for us is three weeks and
we can make sure that we have tackled it all in that way.
Now if you wanna get really tricky about it,
quarantine protocol's probably okay if your procedure
is to put them in an aquarium and then do a biopsy on the fish and
check some of their slime coat underneath a microscope.
And if you can do that and identify that there's no specific parasites
on the fish, then you can do it a whole lot faster into the pond.
But that's how we do it over here at Pond Digger Headquarters.
The final question I have today that we're gonna cover,
is from the Charlie Schmittlein.
And he wants to know the pros and cons between an ecosystem pond and
a dedicated Koi pond, cuz he wants to build a Koi pond,
and he's not sure which is the best option for him.
So I'm go into really the pros and
cons, cuz this is a pretty deep topic.
It can go a lot of different ways, but the real pros and
cons of this are if you're gonna do a dedicated Koi pond, think about
the name of that title, dedicated to the fish, dedicated for the Koi.
So in a dedicated Koi pond,
we're gonna be focused completely on what's best for the fish.
And on and ecosystem pond you're kind of looking for
this full package of stuff.
So there's the two premises that we're gonna work off.
The first and most important thing is an ecosystem pond is 18 to 24
inches deep and a dedicated Koi pond should start at around three foot
and then, go from there, three, four, five feet.
You can get extreme and go eight or nine feet even, but past eight,
I think it's really unnecessary.
But three is probably the minimum you wanna be at.
If you're gonna do a dedicated Koi pond,
you're probably not gonna have any aquatic plants in the pond.
If you're gonna do an ecosystem pond,
you're gonna have plants and fish.
If you are going to do pros and
cons to continue on with that, ecosystem ponds, the way they were
designed is typically to do a water change once a year.
And if you're going to do a dedicated Koi pond,
typically you're doing a little bit of water changes every single
week when you back wash filters and so fort.
Pros and cons, to continue on, ecosystem ponds usually are half of
the cost of doing a dedicated Koi pond.
So, imagine a $10,000 ecosystem pond is really
a $20,000 plus Koi pond, if you go to that extreme,
because the life support takes more, the pond's deeper,
there's more labor, a lot of those things continue on.
More pros and cons, I would say, in an ecosystem pond,
you're gonna have a little bit lighter fish load,
so there's not gonna be quite as much fish going on in there.
Remember the water volume is not as much.
You're getting that full package,
you're getting the water plants and the fish.
You're getting small mosquito fish maybe in there,
other little things that you can put in there, high fin banded sharks.
Mixing other things in there, tadpoles and frogs and all these
things are kind of happening in the ecosystem pond, that package.
With the dedicated koi pond once again, we're focused on the art of
koi, and we want bottom of the pond to disappear, so
I wanna take that to the pros and cons.
Some people really love to see that
cobble in the bottom of an ecosystem pond.
They walk up, they see the gravel, the different textures and
tones, looks very natural to them.
And then when you come over to the dedicated koi pond, they don't want
that gravel in the bottom of the pond, trapping debris and solids
cuz the philosophy of cleaning the water is very different.
You wanna walk up to the dedicated koi pond and
have the bottom of the pond completely disappear.
And just be like this black void where you just see these
beautiful fish swimming across in an artistic fashion.
So those are some of the hardcore pros and cons of it all.
And that's usually how I start off a consultation when I'm dealing with
a client and they're not sure exactly what's right for them.
I start to put that content on the table to show the two different
sides.
And sometimes we agree somewhere in the middle.
So that's the opening stages of the pros and cons between those two
water features, to help you better make a decision what works for you.
So do me this, Charlie.
After you watch this video, give me some more feedback on maybe what's
right for you and then we can take it to the next level.
And once you've got this input, sometimes you go straight for
this or straight for that, and then we can take you along the route and
design the pond that's specific for you and your tastes.
I'm gonna finish the day with a question of the day for
you as I always do.
I wanna know how deep your pond is.
Some ecosystem ponds are deeper then 18 to 24 inches deep.
Some, are three, four foot deep.
But I wanna know exactly your depth on your pond,
I'm very curious to know.
If you want me to answer your
question on Ask the Pond Digger Show, you know how to do it,
#asktheponddigger on all social media platforms.
And I'll do my very best to answer it right here on the show.
That's it for today, thanks for watching.
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