Prepping Lilies For Pond Season

[Koi]

As I was cleaning out my pound I noticed my lilies were no longer dormant, so I decided it was a good time to fix the positioning of my plants. I noticed last summer some of the leaves coming out were all ripped up so it must of had some issues with the rocks I used for the cap and growing towards the rim of the pot didn't help either. The rocks I used were chipped off bigger rocks that I shaped for my water fall feature and I didn't really like the look of it.

  

 

Since I went this far I figured I might as well add some new soil and show some people how I use flower pots for lilies. You can even use fish bowls too haha but I'm gonna replace it with another pot.

So I try to use the pots that have a hole in the middle instead of the corner of the pot since its easier to cover a flat surface. The way I cover it is pretty easy and hasn't leached soil into pond.

I used the bottom of a milk jug and use the weight of the dirt to push it against the flower pot.

In hind sight I should have probably put less dirt so that the cap would be under the rim of the pot because when I checked this morning my koi kicked up all the sand.

Surprisingly I guess the roots did good enough of a job capping the soil cause I tested the water and there is no ammonia.

My question to you guys is when do you consider the start of pond season? Generally my cue to start putting fish outside is when morning temp starts to reach around 70, curious to see when other people start.

[Fish Folk]

Thanks for sharing! Still learning about outdoor ponds, etc. We did our first mini pond last summer. Hoping to add more this year. 
 

We plan to do _cold_ (temperate) fish when overnight temps stay above 55-degrees (i.e. Rainbow shiners, Rainbow Darters, possibly Xenotoca Doadrioi). Warmer fish (e.g. Guppies), we plan to start when overnight temps don’t go much below 70-degrees Fahrenheit. 

[Koi]

@Fish Folk Rainbow shiners can't handle those temps? I would have thought they'd be fine in that water. I caught what I think are gold shiners as bait fish but ended up not using them so I took them home. the lowest my pond get was probably 45 degrees and they look good.

But I know the shiner/minnow name is thrown around a lot for multiple species of fish so maybe thats at play.

@MTAquatics I remembered you asking about floating plants for your pond and if you were considering doing lilies, I figured I shared this with you. Honestly you could just throw the bulb in water without a pot and it will grow, I just like dumping nutrients on plants.

 

[OceanTruth]

Pretty sweet that you’re working outdoors already. Your koi look pretty chunky in the pic. 🙂

[Koi]

@OceanTruth can you believe they were only 3 inches like 8 months ago? They are all past 12-13 inches right now. I’ve been waiting all winter to pack on the food I wanna see if I can double their size.

What I’m really waiting for is it to get warmer to throw my guppies out. Im tryna have a guppy party

[DSH OUTDOORS]

It was -24 this morning on the way to work here in Minnesota...  I have a few months to go before I can start thinking about my small outdoor pond for my guppy party...

[OceanTruth]

@Koi Wow that’s some serious growth in such a short time!!! Koi definitely get more beautiful as they get bigger.

One thing guppies know how to do is party. Lol. I’m sure it depends on the line, but I find guppies to be a bit hardier than I thought they’d be, especially temperature wise.

[Koi]

Did we just coin the phrase “guppy party”?  This needs to be a thing haha

@DSH OUTDOORS so my 45 degree pond is like a sauna for you huh? I will say try to manage the the population unless you have the space to house guppies for a long winter(sounds like yours is much longer than mine) I started with 10 in my 10gallon that reached almost 100 which eventually made it out to the pond. At the end of summer could literally fill my 5 gallon bucket with guppies without the water... I ended up giving away hundreds if not over a thousand

@OceanTruth I thought it was widely regarded that guppies were literally bullet proof. It all started for me when I put some of my guppies out in the pond at 50 degrees and they all made it. Now I probably won’t go that low anymore but my guppies can live in super wide ranges. My pond is like 8.2-8.4 ph summer highs around 90 degrees I’ve seen 95 this last summer. My holding tank is unheated around 70 degrees which stays around 6.4-6.6 ph during the day and 7.6 at night. I’m probably gonna get a lot of hate from people for sharing that but I figure it would be worthwhile for you to know. I think lot of it has to do with them living in my water for so long and my pond not having nitrates ever

[Maggie]

Hi Koi, I think I've seen pics of your whole pond here before - can you post one here too? Seems like it must be a totally awesome pond with fish that size. 

[Koi]

Sure @Maggie! The pictures and videos are not the greatest since they are from my phone. If I can stop spending money on fish, maybe I could try to at least get a decent camera and work on editing some of my videos haha.

So my pond is still a work in progress at the moment. My dad and I built this pond over 15 years ago?? (my god I never realized how long its been) But we never got to finishing it and I decided to try to get it back up and running last year.

I'm hoping this summer I can make some some more fixes, for example the waterfall flow isn't where I like it yet. Because or pure surface area, I lose a lot of water to evaporation and I think there is a leak somewhere. 

 Heres a better look at it. You'll see that I pulled the hosing out of the plumbing of the waterfall just so I can still have water movement. Ignore all the seems and foam, when this is up and running the white water and algae will hide most of it.

This is kind of how the waterfall works. but when I run it into the plumbing like it supposed to, water wraps around from both the left and the right and converges back to the middle.

I never really uploaded videos so I'm still learning how to put out better quality videos

[MTAquatics]

On 2/15/2021 at 1:15 PM, Koi said:

@Fish Folk Rainbow shiners can't handle those temps? I would have thought they'd be fine in that water. I caught what I think are gold shiners as bait fish but ended up not using them so I took them home. the lowest my pond get was probably 45 degrees and they look good.

But I know the shiner/minnow name is thrown around a lot for multiple species of fish so maybe thats at play.

@MTAquatics I remembered you asking about floating plants for your pond and if you were considering doing lilies, I figured I shared this with you. Honestly you could just throw the bulb in water without a pot and it will grow, I just like dumping nutrients on plants.

 

Thank you for remembering! I might try that!

[Koi]

So Round 2!

After realizing that maybe I didn't give my liliees enough dirt last year and my koi kicked up all the sand I cap I added, I decided to repot them again.

This time I'm using 3 times the amount of dirt with extra fertilizer and red clay.

From last year I noticed my lilies stopped growing around july and could only keep 2-3 lilies up till winter. A lot of new growth has sprouted since I repotted, hopefully this amount of dirt will be able to hold my plant over till the end of summer. 

This is in the bigger pots

This is my solution to stop my koi from digging up the sand again.

We'll see in a few months if adding all that dirt/ferts will backfire on me but I hoping that I can maintain a larger plant mass for much longer. Last year I got each pot to hold atleast 20-30 lilies and 3-4 lotuses for a good month or two until the plant stripped all of the nutrients out of my pond.  Just two pots was able to keep my nitrates at 0 during the summer even with 5+ feedings a day to my koi. To add to that, my tap water comes in around 30-40 ppm nitrates which I find crazy that it got enough potassium and phosphorous from fish food/waste to deplete the all of that nitrogen.