Added photo album
Brenda and Don,
Brenda, I didn’t do anything to bring the PH down and it hasn’t dropped very much yet. When the pond was a swimming pool, I was constantly adding PH Rise. For some reason, the pool was always acid. Now I have the opposite problem. It doesn’t help that the town adjusts the tap water to 8.7. I suspect that the PH will continue to drop as more organic material builds up in the pond. By the way, Brenda, I’m Dave, not Dennis.
Don, thanks for complimenting my photos. Photography is another interest of mine. I just wish that Yahoo would allow higher resolution images and more of them. 100 MB is a very small amount of storage for an entire group and reduced resolution doesn’t show enough detail, IMHO, to properly show pond pictures.
To answer your questions: I don’t plan on planting any more trees, although I agree that a red maple would look great. My problem is that I live in the woods and the tree canopy currently overlaps the pond. The trees are mostly Swamp Maple (Silver Maple at the nurseries), mixed with white pine. That’s another reason for thinking that the PH will drop - Pine needles are acid.
As to the filtering, there is a bio-filter at the top of the waterfalls and that is all, at least for now. It has 3 filter bats in the bottom and 2 bags of lava rock on top. The water enters the bottom and flows up and over the lip of the filter to begin the falls you see in my photos. To hide the filter, I have Water Lettuce floating on top of it. The Water Lettuce is kept from going over the falls by a steel wire strung between bolts at the edge of the filter. It should spread to cover the entire filter and will be easy to lift off for filter service. I may have to add a UV light, but I hope not - I’m broke from paying for the pond.
The cloudy water is brown which is why I think that it is suspended silt. I looked at some of the water under a cheapy 100x microscope and saw some critters swimming. The microscope doesn’t show enough detail to identify them, but I would imagine that they are one-celled animals that exist in any pond. I plan to visit the water garden/Koi store today and ask again about the cloudy water. It appears to be getting worse which is the opposite of what one would expect if it were just silt. Since there is only one Koi in the pond, I want to get a buddy for him. I just want to be sure that he’ll do well in the pond. The 5 fish currently in there seem to be fine and come to the feeding ring whenever I go near the pond. They must sense the vibrations from my footsteps since I can’t see them until they are near the surface. That’s the only way I can see that they know I’m nearby.
Thanks to everyone for keeping this an interesting group/club.
Dave W.
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Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society
