Lately we have been dealing with a few damaged ponds here in Southeastern Wisconsin.  Through the years, I’ve been impressed with the durability and resilience of the eco-system ponds that we install.  For the most part, these ponds can withstand all sorts of abuse and come out unharmed.  You can walk, jump, run or swim in your pond without the fear of wrecking anything.  Your dog or dogs can use our ponds as swimming pools and drinking troughs and never do any damage.  Deer can walk through and stand in these ponds and I’ve yet to see a rip in the liner from a deer hoof.  I’ve driven over the pond bottom with a skid steer and an excavator.  I’ve rolled huge rocks around on the rubber liner and even dropped a few huge rocks on the liner.  All of these things and usually no damage.  Granted, you need to be cautious and know what you’re doing to drive equipment and maneuver huge rocks on top of the rubber, but for the most part, clients ponds just don’t get damaged very easily.

The only real damage that we see is from teeth.  Every spring we get a few calls from pond owners whose ponds are suddenly leaking.  Most of the time this is from a hole in the rubber liner somewhere in the stream or the pond edge and it’s usually located on a vertical surface.  It seems that mice like to crawl in between the rocks of our ponds and try to make themselves a little burrow for the winter.  I’ve seen holes the size of oranges and tiny little holes the size of a dime.  Some of the holes are clearly leading to a burrow and others simply appear to be chewed on.  Either way, it is a good thing to look for if your pond has a sudden leak as soon as you fire it up in spring.

Sure, this mouse hole business is definitely damage, but it is not really the damage that I was refering to when I started this post.  The damage that I was refering to is similar but on a much larger scale.  Instead of orange or dime size holes, I’ve seen long holes large enough to pass a party sub sandwich through, sideways!  I’ve seen multiple holes the size of a grapefruit in one pond.  I’ve seen ponds with an entire wheelbarrow’s worth of dirt in them.  Damage to this extent, here in Ozaukee county Wisconsin, I’ve only seen done at the hands (or should I say teeth) of the pond spoiling MUSKRAT!

These toothy little critters can really mess up your pond in a short time!

It seems that the Muskrat likes to swim in ponds and eat the various aquatic plants that we pond owners like to keep in our ponds.  Once they find a pond full of tasty food then they start to think about moving in to stay.  This is when the real trouble starts.  Like the mice, they find a gap between the rocks and they also burrow into the rubber to make a nest.  The difference here is that the mice usually do it in winter and usually do it in the stream or in an edge above the water line.  The Muskrat does it any time of the year and does it well below the water line.  They want to create a burrow that is only accessible from under the water to discourage their predators from joining them I would imagine.  So, they dig and dig and dig.  I’ve seen holes that start one or two feet below the water line with burrows that go for ten feet into the pond bank.  At my house we had one make a burrow that twisted and turned and ended up under my stream.  They want to access it from the water and then create a burrow above the water line to stay dry.  I’ve seen where they, for whatever reason, burrow just behind the rocks in the pond tearing up the rubber all along their path.  This is where the party sub effect comes in.  I’ve seen long holes about six inches wide that stretch for six to eight feet!  Talk about a lot of patching work.  Of course, when tunneling, the spoils must go somewhere.  That somewhere is in your pond.  These pesky creatures push all of the excavated soil into your pond.  So now, not only do you have a pond that is losing water at an alarming rate, but you also have a big pile of mud in your pond.

What to do, what to do?  Well, you definitely want to get these pests out of your pond as soon as possible.  If you ever notice chewed up plant material floating in your pond, you probably have a Muskrat.  At this point you had better act quick.  I’ve heard of people shooting them or trapping them.  I suppose the most humane method would be the live trap, but the Muskrat is a prolific breeder and one female can have up to four litters a season of up to four to eight young each, so I wouldn’t worry about the population.  There is a legal muskrat trapping season in the fall here in Wisconsin.

The patching and clean up from a muskrat can go on for a day or two.  Obviously you need to pump down the water to a level below the holes, or maybe the pond is already at this level due to the gaping hole in the liner.  Find the hole by looking for the telltale pile of mud in the pond or by looking for the chucks of chewed up rubber scattered about the pond floor.  Look in between rocks anywhere that a Muskrat head would fit.  Most of the time you will need to remove all of the rock from the area where you found the first hole.  Moving all adjacent rock will oftentimes reveal more holes.  Once you feel that you have located all of the holes, you can patch them and try to remove as much of the mud as possible from the pond.  If the holes are too large to patch, you may need to seam in an entirely new piece of rubber.  When all of this is done, put the rocks back in place and fill the pond to test your patches.  Keep your fingers crossed, there might be multiple holes in multiple areas.  If you’re not careful, you may need to drain the pond again to find the missing hole.

Luckily, I’ve only seen muskrat damage in five lined ponds since I’ve started installing them, so this doesn’t happen too often, but when it does it is a real mess.  I have seen natural bottom ponds drained by muskrats also, it is very similar, except they just burrow through the side of the pond.  Sometimes they do this simply to create their burrow, other times they want an underground passage from the pond to an adjacent wetland area.  This can be a very hard problem to fix and I’ve heard of people trenching around their ponds with deep trenching machines so that they can fill the trench with heavy clay or concrete hoping to stop the burrowing.

I am currently working on a pond that is rubber lined and was damaged by a Muskrat last fall.  We went in to try to patch it in late fall, but we didn’t find all of the holes, so the pond still leaked.  The homeowner took all of his fish into the basement for the winter and kept them in huge tanks.  We are now in the process of removing all of the rock from the pond and replacing the liner.  Once the new liner is in, we will line the pond with stainless steel screening to prevent any more burrowing.  I have never tried this approach before, but the homeowner found the screening and wants to give it a try.  I guess a winter with a basement full of fish will inspire one to go to great lengths to avoid this in the future.  The pond is about 18′ x 25′ x 3′ deep and the stainless steel screening cost about $3000.  Wow, what an expensive repair job.  I feel really bad about the disruption of the yard, the pond eco-system and the homeowners pocket book, but hopefully he’ll never have this problem again.

We did have one homeowner request protection a few years ago and we installed a galvanized hardware cloth on top of the rubber on only the first shelf level.  The mesh was about 1/4″ squares and was quite rigid.  It wasn’t much fun to work with and we really needed to protect the rubber from it’s sharp protruding wires.  We haven’t been back to repair any holes, but I don’t know if that is because of the mesh or because there just haven’t been any more Muskrats in the pond.

I sincerely hope that you never need to deal with this type of pond damage, but if you do I wish you the best of luck with your repairs.

Doug

This spring, as I take calls for the usual spring clean-outs, I’ve gotten many questions regarding how far a pond owner needs to go for their clean-out.  Do they need to pump it down, remove the fish and pressure wash?  Can they just pump it partially down and partially clean it?  Can they just skim out the debris and start it up?  I guess that I’m getting more questions this spring due to the economic times and peoples’ desire to save a buck.  I can understand that, we all need to tighten the belt a few notches.

Well, the answer is not as simple as they may want to hear, but in short, the answer to all of the above questions is YES!  Any of these spring treatments will work.  Once again I go back to the simple fact that we are talking about natural eco-system ponds, not swimming pools and not fountains.  These are natural ponds, so they can be treated as naturally as you wish to treat them.  Also, I will state again as I have before that when dealing with Mother Nature, there are rarely “sure thing”, cut and dry answers.  The answers are often a bit more interconnected and complicated.

I’ve got many clients who love to see their pond pumped down and completely pressure washed and cleaned each spring.  I liken this to the spring cleaning that many of us do inside our homes.  There is a good feeling that comes along with welcoming the new spring with a fresh clean start.  The same feeling that you may get from a sparkling clean house can also be had from staring into your freshly cleaned water garden.  Each rock as clean and colorful as the day that it was installed and fresh clean water to start the year.  This is the approach that many pond installers and maintainers swear by.  They will tell you in no uncertain terms that you must perform this cleaning every spring.  I profit from clean-outs also, but I’ve got to tell you that this is simply not necessary every year for every pond.  If you like the spring cleaning, then by all means, it is your right to clean out your pond however you see fit.  But, especially in times when many families are trying to reduce expenditures, you shouldn’t feel bad for skipping a year or two.

Take a look at your pond.  If you have an ecosystem pond with rocks, gravel, plants, bacteria, moving water and fish, chances are you don’t need to clean it as often as you might think.  If your pond is not overloaded with fish and it is not heavily burdened with leaves and debris, then you can probably just clean out all of the filter media, manually remove as much debris as you can, start it up and maybe do a twenty percent water change.  Sure, you won’t have that spik n’ span look, but it will most likely be easier on your fish, easier on your pocketbook and easier on the balance of your pond.  When you completely drain and wash a pond, you remove some of the nature.  This thorough spring cleaning puts your pond into a state of relative imbalance.  Personally I fully clean my pond every few years if it looks like it needs it.  Last year and the year before, I simply skimmed out debris with a net, cleaned my skimmer and Biofalls filters, added some barley and bacteria and fired it up.  It wasn’t the cleanest pond on the block and it had some pretty green fuzzy rocks at first, but once the water warmed, it looked like any other year.  The water warms, the plants and fish become more active, the fish eat the algae from the rocks and the plants pull nutrients from the water.  Before you know it I had a nice clean, healthy pond without the extreme clean-out.  This is yet another lesson in the theory that sometimes less is more.  Think nature!

Happy Pondering,

Doug Hurth

This time of year we are knee deep waist deep in pond clean outs.  Most of our pond owners like to start the year with a clean out.  How much of a clean-out is necessary is the often asked question of the season.  I always give my clients options.

Full Clean

A full clean would consist of pumping all of the water from your pond and putting the fish into a holding tank with some of your pond water.  All of your filter pads/media would be removed and rinsed out if you have a skimmer or bio-falls.  If you have a wetland filter, it would be back-flushed with pond water.  All of the loose debris and dead plant material would be removed from the pond, any over-grown over-spreading plants would be thinned and all of the rocks and gravel would be pressure washed.  The pressure washing would result in more debris in the bottom of the pond which would also be removed.  Over the year, due to walking in the pond, fish digging around and our pressure washing, some of the gravel tends to work it’s way off of the upper shelves and down to the bottom.  We redistribute the gravel throughout the pond to ensure a nice layer about an or two thick.  Thicker gravel just causes more problems.  Any rocks that may have moved over the year are reset.  All of the lights in the pond are checked and repaired or replaced.  Many people are replacing the old halogen lamps with new LED lamps.  We then wash down the pond one more time with a garden hose to wash away and pump out more of the muddy yuck on the bottom.  You don’t need the pond to be completely clean, it is a pond and a pond void of all bacteria and enzymes is not well balanced.  So, a bit of muddy yuck is OK, but muddy yuck thick enough to scoop out with your hand is not.  Any and all filter boxes are washed out and the pump, filter pads, media, etc. are installed.  We put barley bales in the bio-falls along with a good dose of start-up bacteria and enzymes and some de-chlorinator if we will be filling with city water.  As we are filling, we will re-introduce your fish.  Once the pond is full, we test run it and we are done.

Partial Clean

With a partial clean, we pump your pond down to the first level, pressure wash only the upper rocks, skim as much debris as possible out of your pond and fill it back up.  The fish are not removed.  All debris that we can get and dead plant material is removed.  All of the filter pads/media are removed and cleaned, the boxes are cleaned and the pumps and media re-installed.  Barley, bacteria and de-chlorinator is added just like the full clean and the pond is filled and started.

Minimal Clean

No water is removed, the filter media is cleaned and we remove as much debris and plant material as is possible with a net.  Barley and bacteria are added, your pump is installed and we run the pond.

Which type of clean-out or start-up you need depends on you and your pond.  If you really like things clean, go with a full clean.  If you like things quick and easy, then go with the minimal clean.  What are you comfortable with?  If your pond bottom is full of last years leaves, many of your fish or all of your fish died, your water looks murky and you found a dead squirrel in your skimmer, then you may want a full clean.  If on the other hand, you enjoy working on your pond, your pond is well balanced, your water quality was great last year, you cut down the plants last fall and you’ve kept the bottom free of debris with your net, then you can probably just start it up and let it run.

The better balanced your pond is, the less cleaning it will need.  The big problem is usually debris build up on the bottom.  For many people, the fall leaves really overload the pond and make a spring cleaning necessary.  Some folks net their ponds in fall to avoid this problem.

In the end, it’s a balance between what the pond needs and what the owner wants.

Happy Pondering,

Doug

I’ve been doing a bit of reading on some pond forums and have read stories of people’s ponds being targeted by mink over the winter months.  As a matter of fact, one of my client’s ponds was totally cleared out over winter by a mink.  They are small crafty little buggers in the weasel family.  I just thought that I would let everyone know that it may be a good idea to check around your pond for tracks just to be sure that you don’t find your pond empty in spring.

Mink are powerful swimmers and aggresive eaters.

When this happened to my client last year there pond was entirely cleared of life.  They probably had 15-20 koi and goldfish in fall, but in spring, nothing.  I was there doing the clean-out and I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I found one fin at the base of the waterfall, that is it!!!  No scales, no dead fish or frogs, no live frogs, nothin’.  I will say that I have never seen a pond so void of life in the spring.  Talk about awful, I felt terrible for the owners.

Evidently they had seen some tracks in the snow, but didn’t think too much of it.  The mink must have gotten in through the hole in the ice where their winter pump was.

While I’m on the topic, let’s talk a bit more about predators.  I’m sure that different areas of the country have different predators, but here in Wisconsin one of the most dreaded pond visitors is the Great Blue Heron.  These birds are fishing machines!  They are quite simply built to catch fish.

Great Blue Heron are fish eating machines!

That’s not to say that they won’t also take their share of frogs, but I believe they prefer the fish.  Not just any fish either, it seems that they usually catch the biggest prettiest one or the one that your kids just named.

Before I owned my pond, I assumed that these huge migratory birds just flew into the pond and started to feed.  Well, I was wrong about that.  I guess that flying in like that would scare the prey.  I’ve seen these birds land on the other side of my yard, walk across the driveway and ever so slowly creep up to the edge of the pond.  Very sneaky!  They get themselves in place to strike without the fish even knowing that they are there.  In our area, these birds have taken more unsuspecting pond fish than any other predator that I know of.  They will even spear a fish that is too big to eat and just leave it to die on the shore.  This was the fate of my beautiful powder blue butterfly Koi.  So sad.

The only other predator that I have heard of eating our pretty little pond fish are the Raccoons.  I personally have never seen one at my pond, but I know people who have seen them going after their fish.  I’ve only heard of them swatting at the fish from the pond edge, but I would guess that they might swim after them too.  I have seen some fish with scars across their sides, presumably caused by a close call with a Raccoon.  I guess that those would be the lucky ones.

As far as preventing these predators from getting to your fish, there are a few options, but none of them are very effective.  I always install a fish cave into every pond to give the fish a place to hide, but this doesn’t help if they don’t know the Heron is there or if a Mink gets into the pond.  A device called the scarecrow is a fairly effective deterrent for the Heron.  This is a motion activated lawn sprinkler that will give the bird a spray if it detects motion.  This will scare the Heron away, but these units are well known for spraying as many pond owners and pond maintenance guys as they are for spraying predators.  Another option is pond netting, which will deter the Herons and possibly the Raccoon, but I doubt it would slow down a Mink.  Trapping is always an option, but the Great Blue Heron is protected under the migratory bird act so you definitely don’t want to catch one of those.  Also, depending where you live, you may have a never ending supply of racoon in your traps as these little guys are usually quite plentiful.

One of the best and possibly easiest deterrents may be the family pet.  The more time your family dog spends pond-side, the less attractive your pond will look to any predator looking for an easy meal.

We’ll go into this more in the future.  Until then, happy pondering and stay warm.

Doug Hurth

O.K., lets get started.  I’ve got a lot of information to convey and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to organize it all.  I think that it would be a good idea to get started with some basics.

This blog is meant to convey real world information regarding pond installation and maintenance.  When I refer to a pond, I mean a naturally balanced ecosystem pond.  This is a pond that by necessity has a controlled body of water that is circulated and biologically filtered.  Many people refer to these as water gardens.  I guess that the title water garden comes from the fact that to be balanced and successful, these ponds need to have aquatic plants growing in them.  However you refer to them, they all need to have similar attributes to make them naturally balanced.  Typically a water garden will be lined with rubber, rocks and gravel.  It will have a waterfall on one side and a pump on the opposite side.  It will be constructed in such a way as to allow aquatic plants to grow and thrive and the water will be treated using bacteria and enzymes.

Two ponds connected by a swim channel.

These ponds can be very large or very small, depending on your wants and needs.  They are usually fairly shallow, and are usually constructed in a stepped fashion versus the old cereal bowl shape.  The people that have ponds will be the first to tell you that they are the center point of their yard.  The pond is the natural beauty of the yard that all life revolves around, whether it is you, your family and friends or simply the wildlife that frequents your yard.  The pond is where you will want to hold your parties and where you will come on those peaceful summer nights to have a cool drink and contemplate life.  There is no other type of landscape improvement that will bring as much beauty and life to your yard.  Humans need water to survive and we are naturally drawn to the sights and sounds of falling water.  You know as well as I do that you can’t walk past a running stream or waterfall with out walking close enough to catch a glimpse of it.  We are drawn to water and we can bring this fountain of beauty and joy into our backyards with a little hard work and a few bucks.

I want to let you know right now that this is not a perfect science.  There are not hard and fast answers to every question.  We are trying to create a natural beauty.  We need to work with Mother Nature, not against her.  Working against nature is a sure way to fail in your water garden endeavor.  Working with nature, and watching and learning from nature, we can create a very natural water feature that is very low maintenance.  Because we are working with nature, there are no perfect answers.  Nature flows and changes daily.  We are not creating a swimming pool where we test the water and dump in the correct measure of chemicals to sterilize the water.  We will never need chemicals, but we will need patience.  Nature grows and flows and we need to allow our ponds to grow and mature naturally to get the most benefit from them.

You will undoubtedly read many other opinions about the correct way to do this or that with your water garden.  Because we are dealing with nature, there are many ways to approach this.  I am going to give you the most simple straight forward truths as I know them.  I’ve been doing this for a long time, have made many mistakes and am continually learning from my mistakes.  I am not promoting any specific brand of product; I think that you can choose your products from what you have available to you.  Maybe you have a supplier nearby and would like to purchase a pre-assembled kit.  That is fine; I will supply you with what you need to know to be successful with your kit.  Maybe you would like to buy as little as possible and make your pond as customized and personally unique as possible.  I will guide you through that as well.  There will be plenty of people who will swear that their way is the only way and that if you don’t buy their products, you will fail.  This is certainly not true.  If you have been doing this for a while, have installed and maintained ponds in the past and have a system that works for you, them by all means, do it your way.  If it aint broke, don’t fix it!  I’ll give it to you straight from years of experience and I don’t mind criticism.  I’m telling you the best way that I have found over the past ten years in the industry.  I am not a pond builder that lets others do all of the work, I am one who is out in the field doing it myself along with the crew.  I am not speaking from heresy, I am speaking from experience.

I am not a scientist, but as we get more and more into this blog I will do my best to explain the whole circle of life that is involved in the balance of a pond or water garden.  For right now, we only need to understand the basics.

1. You need to control the body of water.  This means that you don’t want a lot of water to be running out of or into your pond.  Either of these will cause you problems.  All water contains nutrients, and the more water that you need to add to your pond due to leaking or the more water that runs into your pond due to run-off, the more nutrients that you are adding to your pond.  More nutrients entering your pond will mean more fertilizer for the algae.  More fertilizer for the algae will mean more headaches.

2.  You need a lot of surface area in the filters and bottom of your pond.  More surface area equals more spaces for bacteria to thrive and flourish.  In short, more bacteria will mean fewer headaches.

3.  You need to circulate and aerate your water.  Water with high oxygen content can support more bacteria, and again more bacteria, less headaches.

4.  You need some way to compete with the algae other than chemicals.  Any pond or water feature that you build will grow algae.  That is a fact.  The algae will be there whether we want it or not.  Our job is to give the pond enough tools to combat the algae.  This is where the aquatic plants come in.  Basically, the more beneficial aquatic plants that we can get to grow in our ponds, the more nutrients that those plants will be absorbing.  The more nutrients that these plants can absorb will mean that there will be fewer nutrients available for the algae to live on.  We need to starve out the algae.  It is plain and simple, there is no magic potion.

5.  You will need to have some bottom feeding fish in your pond.  Koi and goldfish are the usual choices for these ponds simply because they are easy to keep, pretty to look at and they will eat the algae.  They will help keep our ponds clean and beautiful if we let them.

These are the basics.  I could go on for hours and hours, but for now, we must underderstand the basics.  I will leave you with one last thought for today.  If you do not want to cooperate with nature, if you do not have patience to let your pond grow and mature, if you want to see all algae in your pond die today, then you need chemicals.  There are many, many pond owners who swear by chemicals, and if you use chemicals, you don’t need plants, bacteria, rocks, flowing water, balance or anything.  You just need to keep buying and adding chemicals for the life of your pond.  With a little patience and understanding, you can have a pond that takes care of itself.  You need to choose nature or chemicals and stick with it.  You can’t go back and forth.  It never works.

Until next time, keep pondering!