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Water meadow gardening

I have overwintered it for the past 3 or so years, though I do admit that my garden is pretty sheltered and in London, I've chanced my arm with a lot of tender plants with some success (and some failure), mostly because of laziness. It did make it through the cold in 2018 though. It's in a basket with Darmera peltata, about 15/20 cm or so under the surface, in some Velda pond soil capped with gravel. However it often escapes and floats freely, or sinks and roots into whatever. In your setup I imagine it would be quite a sight! I've also got some Rotala, Hygrophila and Crypt wendtii in similar conditions out there, so we shall see... Potamogeton gayi also did well this summer come to think of it.
Thanks MWood for sharing the info. Love to see those pond tubs. Really like the plants growing on your wall behind as well. I am certainly going to look out for some H. zosterifolia now and will definitely try it in my ponds.
Great fish, A. mento very much on my list - do you have any problems with the rain making the water less hard than I understand they like?
I have had A mentho outside for years, in tubs not much bigger than yours. And in huge numbers for such small tubs. They have a pond to themselves now. Hopefully next year I can catch some adults to breed and I can get you some eggs or fry. Yes, they prefer hard water and I cover the tubs with plastic in the winter which helps keeping the water from getting too soft because of the rain. I will post more about my fish soon.
 
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Along the edges of the lake where collected some of my plants, I found this marginal, which I quite liked the look of. I planted it a couple of baskets to try out. Does anyone know what it might be? Its pretty vigorous from the look of it.
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I think it's fools water cress as well and I'd advise caution with it. It's a great plant and I'm happy to have it but you need to be really strict. I have it in my pond with fish and also in my brothers wildlife pond and it's rampant in both. The wildlife pond is fed via rainwater so the nutrient levels are much lower than with the fish but it doesn't seem to inhibit the growth at all.
It's very good at sending out runners and they often root to the bottom of the pond or in neighbouring plant baskets, to the point of smothering other plants. I'd advise keeping it in an area you can easily get to and removing any plants that stray from that area otherwise it might dominate your pond to much.
 
nice looking project, id expect the water to clear as the intended plants start to grow, if possible avoid too much topping up with tap water,

only advise is id be wary having living plant matter shipped in from mainland EU or beyond. if you buy a plant that was grown outside the UK on the label there will be its passport number, we at the moment have a few bad diseases brought onto this island and with out good biocontrol we will end up with more,
 
My fishkeeping hobby used to be all about killifish in aquariums. At an auction years ago, I bought some Aphanius mentho which had been bred outside in tubs over the summer. This got me interested and I began researching various forums (mainly Dutch and German) and finding out about people’s experiences of keeping temperate/ subtropical fish outdoors. I put together a wish list and was able to build up a small collection six years ago. I have kept breeding groups going of these ever since. They are mainly killis but also a few other types.

Here I am going to share a bit of that side of the hobby and write a little about the different fish I have kept this way, and my plans for keeping them in my new ponds. I know it is not everybody’s cup of tea but having experienced how little information there is out there, hopefully this might be of use to someone looking into this niche way of keeping fish.


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I don't use any filtration in any of the tubs, I just pack them with lots of oxygenating plants. The tubs contain at least one basket of giant vallisneria and as well as free floating hornwort and Elodea. At water level (on bricks or on a submerged crate), I have baskets of reeds or bulrushes, the roots of which provide more cover and some water mint and other marginals which float across the surface. I keep the water 10cm from the rim of the tub. Once a year, in preparation for winter, I clean out the tubs, mainly to get rid of the debris built up on the bottom. It is also an opportunity to examine all the fish before the winter.

The location of the tubs is important and ideally they should not be in the sun all day. As they contain only small bodies of water, temperatures would rise too much. Digging them into the ground would be best although I have managed to keep them above ground grouped together, with some shading others and marginal plants also helping provide some cover. It also depends on the fish. Some of my fish naturally occur in shallow pools which heat in the sun while others of mine come from rivers which stay cooler.

From mid-October/early November, I group all my tubs together and cover them with a couple of layers of plastic. The plastic provides insulation but also has the benefit of protecting from falling leaves and against excess rain water which could make the water too acidic. At this point, I have removed the marginal plants and only the oxygenating plants remain. The tubs then stay untouched until March next year. I would add a note of caution to this approach as the winters over the last few years have been mild. Digging them in would offer more protection.

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Keeping fish this way requires a lot less effort than in aquariums. Many subtropical fish actually benefit from being kept outdoors for at least part of the year. Of course different subtropical fish have different temperature tolerances and only a very few available ‘aquarium fish’ can be kept outdoors all year round. The seasonal temperature changes, including winter rest, are good for them, as are changes between day and night. Exposure to sunlight is another benefit. Their diet will be much more varied (insect larvae and critters among the debris) and they do not need much additional feeding. No filters to clean, just topping up the water every now when the weather is really hot. Half the year, they hibernate and need even less care. To raise fry, I set up smaller tubs packed with plants and place any baby fish I come across in there, for them to grow on over the summer without any further input needed. Collecting fry needs to be done before the winter clean-out as it will otherwise not be easy to find them among the mud when emptying the tubs.


MACROPODUS OCELLATUS



Into my middle pond, I have introduced this paradise fish seldom seen in the hobby. The location is from the Yangze river in China and this strain is fully hardy.
I had two 250L tubs with about 20 of them in each. In addition, for breeding, I had a group of about 15 in a large but shallow tub (approx 40cm high and a diameter of around 1m) which heats up fast in the sun and this seems to be beneficial for breeding, although I have bred them in larger and deeper tanks in the past also. These fish do not live long, about four years, so it is important they breed while they are two and three years old. I place about five males in the breeding tub with a higher number of females.




The male builds a nest underneath a floating plant leaf or algae pad. You can sometimes spot the bubble nests when lifting a lily pad. In September, I scoop out the young fish as much as I can. With lots of plants in the tubs I could still collect enough fry each year at the end of the season. The adults I leave outside but the young fish go inside for the first winter. In previous years, I raised loads of young by setting up another tub just for them and regularly scooping baby fry from the breeding tub throughout early summer and let them grow up for the rest of the summer in this dedicated tub. This nursery tub will be full of fish by the end of the summer using this method. Baby fish can be scooped from June onwards or even May if we have hot spring weather.

Over the last few years, I raised enough of the M. occelatus to stock my middle pond with about 30-40 of them.





WHITE CLOUD MINNOW
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For the last three years, I have kept four white cloud minnows in a small preformed pond in my garden. I never found any fry, perhaps because this pond is always full of dragonfly /damsel larvae and baby newts. The fish originate from my uncle’s pond in the east of Holland, where winter temperatures are a lot colder than here. He has kept them like this for over 5 years.
The WCMs have joined the occelatus in the middle pond.


APHANIUS MENTHO


This feisty little killifish comes from the Turkey/Iran region. I do not know the exact location of mine. A. mentho has a reputation for being aggressive. In the past, I was able to sell excess stock of my other outdoor fish to a LFS which has reasonable collection of temperate fish but they would not take the menthos as they had previously experienced males wiping out each other. Strangely, I have never experienced any trouble in the 90L tubs I keep them in, or at least, they multiplied in large numbers overall. For a few years, my mentho tubs became over-crowded as a result. In the end, the tubs became overgrown by the reeds and available space reduced and the population became smaller accordingly. The fact that the tubs were packed with plants and roots from the reeds might have helped so many males to co-exist. Or maybe the sheer number of males in one small space made them give up on keeping a territory. Anyway, I found this to be a really easy fish to keep outdoors. In the early years, I used to collect their tiny eggs from the algae pads but I stopped doing this when I realised this was not necessary. The menthos have gone into the second pond from the house.


FUNDULUS JULISIA


Last month, I cleaned out three 250L tubs containing Fundulus julisia. Known as Barrens Topminnow, this handsome killi occurs in only a handful of locations in Tennessee USA and is on the Red List of endangered species. I keep groups of about 15 in large tubs of 250L all year round. Out of the fish I keep in tubs, these are the least shy, though they still make a dive for it when I approach.

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They breed over quite a long season, from about May onwards. They like to lay their eggs in filamentous algae. The picture of the egg was taken in late September, which goes to prove they lay at least until start of autumn. To collect baby fish, I scoop a jug or bucket into the floating plants from time to time and locate any I catch into a separate smaller tub I set up just for them. The nursery tub is full of plants and I leave them to their own devices until October, when I take the youngsters inside for their first winter. When I was trying to raise fry in greater numbers, I would regularly clean out the algae pads from the big tubs and place the eggs in another tub or just chuck the algae pads into a bucket with water and remove the fry from there. This year I did not scoop out fry as the months went on. I only started looking for fry over the last couple of weeks and only collected 7 young fish which is a shame.

I placed about 30 adult fish in the large pond near the house and hopefully will reproduce there. I held back 15 and kept them in a tub to breed further next year. Compared to other fish which I have recently released into my new ponds, I see F. julisia most often.



It seems a bit strange that a fish which is so easy to keep and breed is on the brink of extinction, although huge efforts are underway to save the species. Out of the killis I still maintain, F. Julisia is my favourite which is why I decided they can have the large pond near the patio.


FUNDULUS CATANATUS
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The Northern Studfish from southcentral United States can grow up to 15cm. I think might be the largest killifish there is and males are stunning in the summer months. I was able to buy five young fish back in 2016 but they have not grown larger that 10cm in my tubs. Breeding them involves a bit more effort. In the wild, they lay their eggs in the gravel of river beds and I did not see any young appear I the first few years in the tubs. Last year, I tried placing a pair in an aquarium with flowing water and gravel on the bottom. Unfortunately, the tank sprung a leak and I had to put the fish back in the tub outside. A few weeks later, I noticed eggs in the gravel of the tank. They had fungus on them but at least I knew the system worked. This year, I placed a tray with gravel near the water surface inside the tub with a pump providing some directional flow. I scooped six small fish over the course of the summer and am raising them indoors.

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It is a shame it has taken so long to work out a way to breed them as given their size, it would have been great to be able to release these into the ponds also. I am keeping the adults in a tub however, in the hope they might breed again for one more season, despite their age and the fact I only have one remaining female.



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Since becoming so busy in the garden, I know I won't have the time to keep the tubbing project going and with the ponds this side of the hobby must culminate. Just because the fish did well in tubs however, does not mean they will thrive in a pond.

First of all, pond water is more likely to become increasingly soft due to the heavy rain in the winter months (in contrast, the tubs are covered for six months of the year). This could become an issue for the Aphanius and Fundulus species which prefer harder water. I need to learn a bit more about ways to maintain a certain level of hardness in the pond – any advice would be much appreciated.

Secondly, the Aphanius and Macropudus live naturally in shallower pools of water which heat up considerably in the summer sun. This may not happen in a pond as much as in a tub and might also affect their breeding potential.

Finally, I am afraid the biggest risk is going to come from herons, which may well put an end to my journey of keeping of at least some of these fish. I have seen them fly over occasionally so visits will be inevitable. One of the reasons for holding back some of the breeding stock in tubs is so that I can still pass on these rare fish if I cannot maintain them in the ponds. For the large pond right at the back, where herons I assume will be most comfortable, I am thinking of introducing minnows next year, which would hopefully multiply and cope with the visits. I am not going to mess around with nets or plastic lines etc and would rather put up with the consequences of heron visits. If that means I will only end up with sticklebacks and minnows, so be it. But after keeping them going all these years, it would be nice if at least some of my populations could sustain themselves in their new homes.

Pond number four (second from the back) I am hoping to keep fish free, as a wildlife pond.
 
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Thank you Mort and Tim!
useful for many of us that would like to expand our hobby outdoors with different fish choices.
I found this resource quite useful: a list of fish suitable for outdoors (not all of them all-year round) with indicative lower temperature tolerance ranges compiled by Martin Tversted from Denmark. Especially if you are prepared to take them indoors over winter, the choice is huge. It is a great starting point from which to do further research.

If I were to add any other fish to one of my ponds outdoors (year round), it would be some US shiners; Cyprinella lutrensis and Notropis chrosomus.
 
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Let me share a very brief update on progress with the pathway and decking. Work on this part of the project started in September, after the ponds were constructed. Here are some pictures of my builders in action.

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I realised I needed more access to the ponds for maintenance and so I decided to also have some boardwalks built. I like the idea of boardwalks as they will help create a wetland feeling, an impression hopefully of walking through a marshy area. Later on, when the builders have finished, I will bury some of my tubs around the boardwalks so I can grow bulrushes or reeds outside of the ponds to help further create this effect and make the pond margins seem far deeper than they really are. On the picture below, I have drawn in orange where the boardwalks will go. The idea is that on either side, they will end inside the ponds, as mini jetties. The boardwalks are being built at the moment, see video below. The second picture underneath shows what the boardwalks will roughly look like when finished (image from internet).

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It is taking a long time to get completed because the builders had to start another job and can only do bits and pieces in between but not long to go now...

 
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I guess like many on this forum, I have always been obsessed with water. I grew up in Holland spending most of my childhood fishing when I was not in school. Something about the water’s edge has always fascinated me and to this day, whenever I pass by a pool or a ditch, I just have to make my way over to see if I can spot anything of interest.

I have kept planted tanks for most of my life but have always been dreaming about having a garden where you can walk through drifts of reeds and marginal plants, moving from one pond to the next.

When three years ago I moved into a house with a decent sized garden, I realised I finally had the opportunity to actually plan my own wetland garden for real.

My biggest inspiration comes from my visits to the Pond Gardens of Ada Hofman in Holland;

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Ada Hofman is like the Gertrude Jekyll of the Dutch garden-pond world. In the 1980s she started writing books to promote principles of pond keeping based on achieving clear water through the use of oxygenating plants alone, without the use of any mechanical filtration, pumps, UV lights or chemicals. What always struck me was how her ponds seemed to merge effortlessly into the margins of the garden beyond. No pond liner to be seen nor a surround of cobbles or other 'natural' hardscape materials supposedly hiding the liner. To me, she combined the best of the aquarium world, creating lush submerged planting arrangements to be observed in clear water, with garden design which leaves the visitor feeling immersed in nature;


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Before I moved house three years ago, my big passion was my planted tank which I enjoyed blogging about on this forum (giant tank for killis). The other side to my hobby is keeping fish in outdoor tubs. In these, I keep killi fish and other species from places like Iran, North America or China which can be held outdoors all year round. After moving house, I made a painful decision to let my fish tank go and focus all my efforts on the water garden which will eventually provide a home for all the fish I have been keeping in tubs for all these years.


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After a year in my new house, I found a small preformed pond dumped out in the street nearby which I repaired, painted black and dug in a corner of the garden close to the patio. I planted some grasses and perennials around it and in a way created a mini template for how I would like the whole garden to look one day;


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Apart from this and my ‘tubbing’, I have not had ponds before nor attempted to garden on a scale like this. However, I have been reading up a lot over the years while day dreaming about this concept. I hope that this passion, together with my knowledge from keeping aquariums and outdoor tubs, and any help I can gather along the way, will be enough to see this project through.


To start with, let me share some pictures of what the garden looked like when I moved in;


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My garden is around 35m long and 13m wide. It took a few years to clear the site and get ready for the project. Last year, I took down the garage and built a shed next to the house to still have some storage space. This spring all the concrete from the drive was removed, alongside all the brickwork and remaining pathway. By the mid-June the garden was clear and ready for the works to start.


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I drew up some very rough sketches for my concept of the garden. A wooden walkway will wind through the garden and cross a series of ponds. The ponds will be visually connected through planting arrangements which suggest marshy conditions in between them. At the end of the pathway, towards the back left of the garden where there is a side gate, there will be a jetty over the water with an existing collection of fruit trees behind, which will become an orchard area. Everything else in the garden will be covered with perennials and grasses which either originate from water meadows/ wetlands or which resemble such habitats.


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View attachment 154728For a number of years, I have been reading up on the naturalistic gardening movement and in particular liked the work of Nigel Dunnet from the University of Sheffield. Nigel is well known for creating loose and intermingled high density planting arrangements which evoke the look of wild natural settings. In autumn last year, I came across some posts on Instagram from a young garden design company called Plantology. They were reviewing books from the same designers I had been following and one of their posts offered a discounted fee for engaging them during that period.

Even though I need to do the garden on quite a tight budget and will be propagating many of the plants needed myself, I know that making mistakes also costs money. While I have some plant knowledge and experience of growing many of the perennials on my ‘wish list’, I still have much to learn, in particular about the way different species combine and intermingle. I decided that given the overall cost of the project, spending an extra few hundred pounds to help me think through the design properly – especially the design of hard landscaping – could be worthwhile. After speaking to Hayley Hughes at Plantology, I knew I had found the support I needed to make the most of my ideas and resources. Hayley sounded as passionate as I was and was especially interested in working with me on the ecological aspect of things - putting together planting communities to represent the wetland theme. Icing on the cake was that she studied at the University of Sheffield and mentored by Nigel Dunnett.

Hayley translated my sketch into a proper design and we agreed on a masterplan based on five separate ponds which will hopefully appear as three ponds separated by the wooden walkway at two points:


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By stroke of luck it turned out that a labourer I had engaged for a couple of days during lockdown to remove the last bit of remaining concrete had some landscaping experience. Aldis has never built ponds before but knows how to lay decking. I have never built ponds either but have read up a bit and feel confident enough that we can get this done between us. I found a man with a digger who agreed to help out for three days and Aldis agreed to help me for three weeks to build the ponds, pathway and decking.

I am super excited to get started albeit a bit daunted by the sheer scale of the project at the same time. Through this blog, I hope to share some moments and experiences of creating my 'water meadow garden’ - of maintaining ponds using the ‘Ada Hofman’ method, of keeping fish outdoors from temperate and subtropical regions, as well as my efforts in creating an overall ‘wetland’ feel to the garden mainly through the use of perennial plants and grasses. I am also interested to what extent it will be possible to create underwater landscapes, like we try to achieve in our planted tanks, but viewed from above instead, and experiment with using 'aquarium plants' in and around the pond.

I am keen to learn from others and as part of this will try to share my joys and challenges with you all during this journey.
Where did you get those large black plastic half barrels from? I have one exactly like that but I'd like to buy some more.
 
Where did you get those large black plastic half barrels from? I have one exactly like that but I'd like to buy some more.
I was able to buy six large tubs through Ebay but also added a number of disused loft tanks/ cold water tanks to the collection which I found in skips over the years. The larger loft tanks are the same size (50 gallons). Depending on where you live, you may come across them in skips outside older houses having loft conversions done. You can buy them new for just over £50 delivered; Kingspan Ferham 227L Circular Cold Water Storage Tank | PlumbNation.co.uk | Cylinder Accessories

They make nice little mini ponds. I use bricks to build a wall on the inside of the tubs to place marginals on. Last year, I began to make more use of black plastic crates as these did not decrease the water capacity like the bricks do, although I think that bricks might play a useful role in providing habitat for insects and surface area for bacteria etc. Here is a video of one of the 50 gallon loft tanks;




Smaller tubs up to 90L are much cheaper, I think you can get a 90L tub through Ebay (search horse feeding tub) delivered for just over £20. I have kept and bred fish in these sized tubs also, without any filtration, but obviously there is less margin for error.

Last week, I emptied a smaller 60L tub which was full of bricks and had some marginal plants on top. To my surprise, there were still some Macropodus ocellatus in there;

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I must have used the tub last year as a nursery to grow fry on in and these somehow got left behind. Towards the end of last autumn I filled the tub with bricks and covered the surface with baskets of marginal plants. When I emptied it last week, the tub had turned anaerobic. It was smelly and full of mud. Unbelievably, there were six fish in there, looking healthier than their siblings I had grown on indoors over winter. They had spent the whole winter outside in this small tub, which was unprotected and obviously had frozen over a number of times. A testament to the hardiness of this species and suitability to be kept outdoors.
 
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I was able to buy six large tubs through Ebay but also added a number of disused loft tanks/ cold water tanks to the collection which I found in skips over the years. The larger loft tanks are the same size (50 gallons). Depending on where you live, you may come across them in skips outside older houses having loft conversions done. You can buy them new for just over £50 delivered; Kingspan Ferham 227L Circular Cold Water Storage Tank | PlumbNation.co.uk | Cylinder Accessories

They make nice little mini ponds. I use bricks to build a wall on the inside of the tubs to place marginals on. Last year, I began to make more use of black plastic crates as these did not decrease the water capacity like the bricks do, although I think that bricks might play a useful role in providing habitat for insects and surface area for bacteria etc. Here is a video of one of the 50 gallon loft tanks;




Smaller tubs up to 90L are much cheaper, I think you can get a 90L tub through Ebay (search horse feeding tub) delivered for just over £20. I have kept and bred fish in these sized tubs also, without any filtration, but obviously there is less margin for error.

Last week, I emptied a smaller 60L tub which was full of bricks and had some marginal plants on top. To my surprise, there were still some Macropodus ocellatus in there;

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I must have used the tub last year as a nursery to grow fry on in and these somehow got left behind. Towards the end of last autumn I filled the tub with bricks and covered the surface with baskets of marginal plants. When I emptied it last week, the tub had turned anaerobic. It was smelly and full of mud. Unbelievably, there were six fish in there, looking healthier than their siblings I had grown on indoors over winter. They had spent the whole winter outside in this small tub, which was unprotected and obviously had frozen over a number of times. A testament to the hardiness of this species and suitability to be kept outdoors.

Nice! Those are really cool fish too, I'd never heard of them before. I have a really nice and very strong giant black barrel that originally held salt lick for livestock and it's been frustrating me that it seems cheaper to buy a whole barrel of animal feed or salt lick just for the tub than it is to buy the same kind of plastic tub sold as a 'preformed pond' or 'barrel pond'. Your garden is going to be breathtaking.
 
On the subject of tubs, now that I am scaling down the number of tubs I am going to be using for outdoor fish breeding, I will briefly share how I will be utilising them in this new project.
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I have dug in a number of large tubs along a length of the board walk. The idea is to plant reeds (Phragmites australis variegatus) in the tubs, as well as in the ponds (also in tubs to protect the liner) to help create that wetland feel and visually extend the marginal planting beyond the actual pond.
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Here I have sketched the look what I hope the tubs will help create. Overall, I am aiming for a repetition of plants growing in the water and on land. When I start planting over the next few months, I will initially focus on this plant community which stretches across a number of ponds and will be visually dominated by drifts of purple loosestrife with accents of reed beds dotted around. Other plants growing in and out of water will include Juncus inflexus, Carex elata Aurea and Phyostegia virginica and on land these will be growing among a mix of Filipendula vulgaris/ F. ulmaria, Molinia Moorhexe, Sanguisorba sp and a few others . Growing next to the reeds on land will be Eupatorium cannabinum. I plan to do something similar with bullrushes (Typha sp), perhaps with a few tubs dug in here and there running along the right of planting drawn below.
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I will try to post a few pictures soon to show you where we are with the build of the board walks.
 
Great to see the ponds coming to life again. I have spotted newts in all of the ponds and frog spawn has started hatching today.

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There is a lot of blanket weed in all the ponds. I need to get more marginal plants in there and more plants which grow earlier in the season, including Potentilla palustris. I have pulled out what I can and hope that the blanket weed will reduce as the aquatic plants inside the ponds take off. Also hope that the blanket weed will become less as the ponds mature over the years.

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I have removed lots of blanket weed and with it out also out came lots of free floating Elodea which was totally tangled up in blanket weed. I am not sure if I have done the right thing here. If my plants were growing healthily, I was thinking that I would not have as much blanket weed. There was a very large amount of Elodea in all of the ponds, both floating and in baskets. I was thinking that maybe there were too many plants and too little nutrients left for all of them? Maybe this is too early in the season for this scenario and the Elodea would not have not even have started growing properly anyway and I need to look for a remedy with alternative plants? There was no way of separating the floating Elodea from the blanket weed so it was a question of removing both or leaving it be. With newts breeding in the ponds and frogspawn hatching, I thought now would be the time to remove blanket weed before risking tadpoles/ baby newts getting caught up with blanket week I remove in a few weeks' time.

There are still plenty of baskets left in each pond of both giant Vallisneria and Eleodea. Also most ponds contain some hornwort and water soldier.

I have started to fertilise the pond plants with Osmocote slow release fertiliser tablets (Osmocote for pond plants). I bought a nice big box of tabs which should make it more economical for me to feed the hundreds of baskets which will be in the ponds by next year.

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So far I have fertilised the Vallis and water lilies. What do people think about fertilising the Elodea baskets? I wonder whether Elodea really take up that many nutrients from the soil or whether their roots are more for anchorage?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
 
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