Winterizing II (2008)

Can't believe (yes I can) it's been nearly a year since my last post, which was about winterizing the pond and getting it ready for the Winter of 2007-2008. Well, you know that old saying, no news is good news, and as much as this blog was started largely due to the trials and tribulations I was having with my pond in 2007, the main reason there's been no posts for 2008 -- besides laziness, that is -- is that nothing bad happened this year, pond-wise. Compared to last year, 2008 was entirely uneventful insofar as the Buddha Pond is concerned.

The only pond based pain-in-the-butt that I can recall was actually still from late last year, after the winterizing I mentioned in the previous post. I guess you could call it the icing on the cake. The pump I'd had for at least 3 or 4 years finally gave out, just a few days before Christmas, which was a bummer, budget-timing wise, but by then the weather and pond water was cold enough it wasn't something where I had to drop whatever I was doing to rush out and buy a pump, though I did get one within 24 hours.

Now, the Buddha pond isn't quite 200 gallons, but I'd always used a pump rated for about 200 GPH, so that's what I went looking for, but due to a labeling error, I ended up with one that is actually rated for 240 GPH. It turns out to have been a real plus, overall.

The extra flow does cause me to lose more water from the pond than usual, due to the stronger jet which, over time, causes more water to simply splash out of the pond, but the good part is that it seems that added flow has done wonders for the ponds health.

2008 has been the mirror opposite of 2007, insofar as the problems I was having last year with cloudy water, after the pond had mysteriously and disastrously lost all of its mojo. This year the pond was exceptionally clear, all year long. It's not unusual for it to be very clear when it's cold, but as Winter turned to Spring, and Spring to Summer, etc., the pond just kept on being clear. And I mean so clear that it looks inviting enough to drink (though I still would not, of course). Even during a few times when I was tardy in getting to needed water changes.

Also, and this could be coincidence (as all of this could be), I had almost no problems with algae this year. There's always quite a bit in the Spring, because with no leaves on the trees it gets an extra dose of sunlight, but one the leaves came in and I treated (non-agressively) for algae once or maybe two times, it remained very minimal to non-existent, all Spring, Summer and now well into Fall.

I did a water change over the past weekend, and while I think it would be good to go for this coming Winter, I'll probably do one more change if we get a warm enough weekend to the use the hose, after I'm done with the last of the leaves.

Winterizing

For all my earlier pond troubles in the year you'd think I'd have been a little more diligent about keeping leaves out of the pond than I have been this Fall. Part of the problem -- besides being busy -- was that I was being deceived by all the teeny Water Lettuce in the pond. When the first leaves began falling they would land on top of the Water Lettuce mat that had blanketed the surface of the pond. I'd see those and was able to pick them off, but what I wasn't seeing was the ones that had already fallen through and sunk to the bottom of the pond.

Several weeks ago I did a about a 50% water change and cleaned out what leaves had collected at the time. The water was fairly dark, looking like well-steeped tea. The reason for the extent of the water change, besides the color, was that my pond testing before the previous water change, a few weeks prior, had indicated that the level of nitrates were again climbing, while everything else, PH, Nitrites, Ammonia and Salt Level were excellent -- which means 0 (Zero) for the Ammonia and Nitrites. This last time around the Nitrates were still very low, but I wanted to get them lower.

Then the leaves started coming down in earnest. Last year I lost my netting, but instead was very dilligent about skimming the pond daily to keep leaves from steeping in the water. I haven't done that this year, and oddly, even though we had a false start Spring and then a very dry Summer, the leaves hung onto the trees a good three weeks longer than they have in a so-called "average year."

So the leaves are down now, though it keeps wanting to rain whenever I want to rake them up, and by yesterday the water was looking as dark as I have ever seen it. I could no longer see the fish. Definitely time for a change. I did a very extensive one. More, I'm sure, then the experts would say is advised, but the pond is crystal clear again, Dreamcicle and Blue appear healthy (and appreciative)and the water test readings were all good.

I've put in a fresh filter and it's got to make it through to the Winter as it will probably be the last change until Spring, barring a long stretch of mid-Winter 80 degree days where it's safe to use the hose.

A Welcomed Water Lettuce Invasion

It's been a while since I posted. August, in fact. I've been up to a lot of things, of which the main thing has been JohnnyGuitars.com.

Meanwhile, the fish, Dreamcicle and Blue, have been doing well, thank you. And after all the earlier troubles of the year -- Keybo dying, Dreamcicle's month long brooding or whatever the hell it was, the mysterious 6 weeks of pond cloudiness and then the even more mysteriously magical clearing on August 6th -- pond mojo appears to be back to stay, at least so far.

The only thing that remained puzzling was a long stretch of time, after the water had cleared, where I was completely unsuccessful at keeping any floating water plants alive longer than about 14 days, and then that too magically stopped happening.

I would buy 3 or 4 Water Hyacinths at Home Depot and put them in the pond, and they'd look real nice for about a week, then they'd start turning brown and slowly rotting away. A couple of times I managed to find ones that were blooming, but even when I drove them straight home (less than 3 miles away) it was hard to keep those blooms from wilting in the plastic bag before I could get the plant in the pond. I went through this a couple of times, replacing the Water Hyacinths and also adding in a single "bunch" of Water Lettuce, but within 2 or three weeks they'd all be looking pretty sorry. In past years I've added one or two bunches of Water Lettuce and the next thing I know I've got 4 or 5, etc. They start off as a tight bunch, then they shoot out sideways rhizomes (not sure that name applies to a water plant since there is no "underground")that become another plant and then eventually breaks away from the original mothership plant. Sometimes I even find them that way in the store, although once the cashier at Home Depot accused me of undercounting the number of plants I had in the bag until I pulled it out and showed them the that the "two" plants were in fact still connected as one.

I can only guess that at that point, having gone through all the earlier roller coaster pond mojo changes that the water was still a bit too "sterile" in nutrients to support plant life. However, finally, after about the 3rd or 4th shopping trip for more plants, one of the Water Lettuce "bunches" took hold and began to thrive and then proceeded to take over. Though I never saw any additional "bunches" that were anywhere near the size of the last original plant I dropped into the pond, I soon had hundreds and eventually thousands of itty-bitty Water Lettuce islands covering the surface of the pond -- looking almost more like that "Duckweed" in the picture, though not all connected to one another -- to the point that I eventually would have to skim some out now and then.

I didn't mind them at all, and the fish needed the shade. Plus, the Water Lettuce was doing a great job competing with algae, and the pond has stayed algae free without the use of any chemicals.

Unfortunately there's no way the Water Lettuce will survive the Winter, and around here I rarely see it on sale anywhere nearby until well into the mid-Summer. So I've got a few samples in glass dish that I'm going to see if I can keep alive indoors over the Winter, and get them back in the pond next Spring as soon as it's consistently warm enough for them to survive, so that they can get a foothold before the algae gets too far ahead of them.

We'll see.

Magical Mojo Mystery

This is more good news, but a mystery nonetheless.

Besides the loss of Keybo in June, the most anxiety producing aspect of the Buddha Pond this season was the fact that, after 7 years of relatively painless maintenance, it seemed to completely lose its Mojo.

I have an over abundance of theories as to why this happened, but most will remain just that, theories, and untested ones at that.

Was it the bizzare Winter we had in '06/'07, where frigid temperatures came in October, nearly two months ahead of schedule, then turned into an unusually warm Winter that last almost to the end of January? Was it the early hot Spring we had in March that made the trees leaf out 3 weeks ahead of schedule, followed by a killer 3 day frost in early April that killed them all, making the trees have to start over and make new leaves?

Who knows? My earliest problems did have to do with way more string algae than I'd ever had a problem with before. I blamed that on the warm Winter and then the extended lack of shade over the pond after the leaves all fell off.

Perhaps it's how I tried to deal with that problem. I used an algae control chemical, from TetraPond, that I had never used before. It's active ingredient is Poly [Oxyethylene (Dimethyliminio) Ethylene (Dimethyliminio) Ethylene Dichloride]. For years I had been using these little white cake things called PondBlock (active ingredient Copper Sulfate pentahydrate), but they don't seem to be very effective when the water is cold. Again, at that time, in the early Spring, my main problem was string algae, with no noticable suspended algae.

For the longest time it seemed that neither product was working. The string algae wouldn't budge.

Then came all the health problems and the eventual death of Keybo. When I first saw Keybo's infected eye, I panicked. I started using a Fish Treatment from TetraPond that I had never used before. It contained Formaldehyde and Quinine-Hydrochoride. Previously the closest thing to an anti-bacterial I had used was MelaFix. For several years that seemed to do everything I needed insofar as healing various fish sores, etc. But like I said, I panicked, and I started using stronger medicine.

Then came the day I tested the water and Ammonia and Nitrites were off the charts. It's been so many years since I had any problems controlling these that I can't remember the last time I saw them above zero.

Right or wrong, I came to the conclusion that I had managed to kill off too much bacteria, even the beneficial stuff. Soon after the death of Keybo things got to a point where it was as if I was starting the pond anew. There was no algae, but also, apparently, no Mojo. I was back to where I was in the first season we had fish in the pond, chasing my tail trying to manage toxicity and clarity in the water.

During the entire month of July I was making weekly water changes. The toxicity was getting under control, but then a new problem came in the way of suspended algae. I would change water and it would look great, for about a day. As the week progressed, each day the pond would get cloudier and cloudier. Within 3 days it would be nearly impossible to see the fish unless they came right up to the surface. Water changes, clarifying agents and plants seem to be doing me no good, at least not in the long run.

My last water change was on July 29. The water continued to look good a little longer than previously, maybe about 3 days, but it was obviously clouding up again, just a little slower than usual. I had to accept that as progress. It looked certain I would be doing another water change on the weekend. But the weekend came and I didn't do it on Saturday. I also blew it off on Sunday, and it was looking pretty bad. I had been monitoring for toxicity all along, and that was zero, as it should be, but the water again looked like thick, green soup. So I told myself I was going to have to deal with it by Monday for sure.

Monday morning, as if by magic, the water was clear. The clearest water I had seen since early June. You could see the gravel on the bottom of the pond, easily. Better yet, Tuesday morning, today, it's even clearer. Like sparkling clear drinking water.

Just to make sure there wasn't something wicked going on, I did the whole battery of water tests this morning and everything tested out great.

We're having a heat wave. The water this morning was 82 degrees F. Could that be it? I dunno. I'm a little weary on theory at this point.

It's a Magical Mojo Mystery.

Random Buddha Pond Notes

I'll do the third and final post about Keybo's death after I get the final results from his Necropsy. I'm so tired of educated guessing, so I'm trying to get some facts.

Dreamcicle has been driving me nuts. I don't think she is ill, but I can't tell for sure. She's definitely not as active as usual, but it's been hot day and night and the pond water temperature has been staying at around 80 degrees F. Plus, she doesn't have Keybo to boss around anymore and that definitely was one of her favorite pastimes, if not the favorite.

Blue seems normal. I haven't introduced Blue yet because of Keybo's demise. I will. Soon.

The pond is driving me nuts, too. I'll be posting in the future about how the Pond Mojo has been all out of whack in 2007. It has never been this mysterious since the first year or two after we added fish to the pond in 2000. The usual tests (PH, Ammonia and Nitrites) look good, and today I also tested Nitrates. They're a little high, but dangerously so, according to what I've been reading lately.

The main problem at present is general cloudiness, even after water changes. That's never been a problem in the past five years, except after replenishing a large amount of Salt. That sometimes clouds up the pond as it dissolves (I add rock salt) but it usually disappears after 48 hours. I've added both some Accu-Clear and Simply-Clear. I probably should have been more patient and added one at a time, but the cloudiness is bugging me too much.

I'm going to have a drink now.

The Eye of Keybo

This is part one of what happened to Keybo.

Sometime in late Winter or very early Spring we noticed that Keybo no longer had a right eye. That's right. His right eye was gone. Vanished. Unfortunately, other than my video camera—which takes crappy stills—I didn't have any way to capture this, so I have no pictures of Keybo's missing eye. But all that was left of where his right eye used to be was a small hole. Other than that, there was no sign of any kind of trauma. No torn flesh. No visible scars. Nothing. Other than the small hole—which is where I imagine the optic nerve from his former eye used to come through from his skull—it was just fleshy, with his normal colored flesh, and it just looked liked he had never had an eye there, but he had.

Strange.

No. Very strange.

However, other than missing an eye and being obviously blind on his right side, Keybo's behavior in the pond appeared normal. Until about mid-May.

Though he was the biggest fish in the pond (after Nabu, who I haven't told you about yet) Keybo was the most shy. Usually when I approached the pond he would casually swim away. If the other fish approached he would join them, but keep his eye(s) hidden below them.

Sometime in mid or late May I walked up to the pond, and there was Keybo, sort of hanging on in one "corner" next to a plant basket. He didn't swim away as I approached, and he was hardly moving at all except for very slow gill and fin movement, to keep himself in place. His good eye was also tracking me as I moved about the pond.

Not good. It's never good when Koi isolate themselves from the others. They (the ones in the Buddha Pond at least) are generally pretty sociable and like to hang with each other. When fish isolate themselves it's usually a bad sign that indicates something is terribly wrong with them. Not only was Keybo keeping his distance from the others, but the fact that he was letting me stand there and look at him was not his typical behavior.

Then I moved over to where I could take a look at his blind side. I was horrified! It was all black and red and looked like your classic "black eye." Seriously. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought that Keybo was sneaking out of the Buddha Pond at night and getting into bar fights.

I dropped what I was doing and starting testing the pond. Pond Mojo was gone! Ammonia levels were somewhere between 1 and 2 ppm, while Nitrites were at or over 5 ppm—which the top of the chart! Both of those measurements were off the charts as far as I was concerned, since, according to previous testing results, I'd been able to keep them consistently at ZERO for 4 years or more. The water looked clean and crystal clear. Obviously that in itself doesn't mean a whole lot. I've seen times when the water looks murky, especially in the Fall, when leaves get in and settle in the pond, but even at those worst looking times, when I tested, Ammonia and Nitrites were ZERO.

So I changed the water in the pond. More than 50%. That is, I pumped out at least half of it, refilled the pond to full, then pumped that out about 1/3rd. Whereas PH can be adjusted virtually instantaneously with additives (citric acid or baking soda), there's not a lot you can do to instantly rid a pond of Ammonia and Nitrites. Water changing helps drastically, but it won't get those levels back down to zero instantly or even overnight. You need the whole bio-filter, beneficial bacteria and Pond Mojo mechanics going again to those numbers to ZERO. After you change the water you have to re-salt the pond (yes, even fresh water fish need salt in the water to keep them slimy, which is good for their health) and, for our pond, rebalance the PH.

Afterwards I became super-diligent about monitoring the pond everyday for the next week or so. I also monitored Keybo several times a day. He was definitely improving, though I wouldn't say he ever became normal again. But he did get out of that corner and was spending more time with the other fish and he resumed being afraid of me. If I wanted to get a good look at his eye I had to sneak up on that blind side.

It's usually hard to get a good look, but, after only a few days, the discoloration of his missing eye was way improved, but not gone. Then, oddly, I noticed something even stranger about it. It vaguely looked like his eye was reforming. At first I convinced myself it was an optical illusion of sorts, but a few days later, with the discoloration all but completely gone, I was certain. His eye was coming back!

Whether it was ever really gone or had somehow sunken back into his skull, I'll never know. The end of May was when I bought my Pentax K10D and started taking frequent pictures of the Buddha Pond and its residents. It came in particularly hand for examing Keybo, since he is too afraid of me to let me get a good look at him. If I could at least occasionally capture of decent photo of him, I could examine it all day long on my computer. The problem was capturing a decent picture, because Keybo was so afraid of me and stayed low in the water, below the distorting ripples. By June 11 I had a decent enough image of both sides of Keybo to compare his two sides.Keybo's formerly missing right eye (shown on the right) was beginning to be visible, but it still looked different and more sunken in that his left eye (shown on the left.) Then I got smart on June 15th and turned off the pump and caught some undistorted pictures. This image is a full-screen snapshot taken while I examined a photo of Keybo using Apple's Aperture. There was still a visible redness, but his right eye had, indeed, returned.

Meanwhile, I continued to monitor the pond and Keybo and the other fish. Keybo was still spending more time than usual by himself, but appeared to be making a full come-back.

Three days later he was dead.

(to be continued)

Pond Mojo

I've begun to get some preliminary info back from the state animal laboratory that is doing the necropsy on Keybo. I'll cover what happened to Keybo after I have some more facts.

That's the trouble with keeping a fish pond: it usually comes down to Mojo more so than it does to hard, cold facts.

We inherited our pond along with our house, in 1999. The previous owners had fish in it, but they took them with them. We simply put a pump in the pond to keep the water from getting stagnant, and let the pond remain fish free until the Spring or Summer of 2000.

I got some books on fish and ponds, as I wasn't finding near as much on the web back then as I can find now. We read up on the particulars of an "established" pond and started to learn about all the ins and outs of pond mojo. Most of us who ever had a goldfish as a kid learned about how bad chlorine is for fish, and how algae can grow in a fishbowl.

In order to keep fish alive in a pond you have to be able to keep the PH balanced, have zero levels of Ammonia and Nitrites, and in some quarters the jury seems to be out on Nitrates, though it looks like they're leaning towards Nitrates being bad too. When I first started putting fish in the pond, Nitrates were being rather downplayed, and I'm still not totally up to speed on those.

Where Ammonia and Nitrite were toxic to the fish, Nitrate is essentially harmless. There have been reports that high nitrate levels may weaken the colors in Koi but there have also been reports that high nitrate levels can enhance the colors. Similarly, I have read reports, fortunately not in the same article, that high nitrate levels will both stimulate and suppress spawning activity. If the Nitrate concentration gets too high, the Nitrite-Nitrate converting bacteria (Nitrobacter) may not be able to do their job effectively resulting in a raised Nitrite level. Nitrate is the end result of the nitrification cycle and is very important to plants in their life cycle. This is why the plants in your garden can flourish from being watered with the waste water from your pond (assuming you haven't added too much salt).

Like all living things, fish eat and they pee and poop, creating "waste." Waste creates Ammonia and Nitrites, and so does other waste like rotting, uneaten fish food, and rotting leaves and other dead or dying plant dying life that gets in the pond. Along with mechanical filtration of the water (filtering out heavy particles like dirt and leaves) you have to have a good bio-filter which consists of colonies of beneficial bacteria. I can't see them, but these supposedly live inside little plastic balls that look like black, wiffle golf balls. The little balls are inside the mechanical filter, as part of the pump housing.

Good pond mojo is when everything is in perfect balance. The beneficial bacteria turn the Ammonia and Nitrites in the pond into Nitrates which, theoretically, are either harmless and/or are consumed by any living plant life in the pond. To oversimplify it a bit, you feed the fish, they feed the beneficial bacteria, and the beneficial bacteria feeds the plants. When all this is good you have a healthy and clear pond with healthy, happy fish (the pond is the fish and the fish are the pond, you can't really separate them).

When you've really established good pond mojo, this can nearly happen on auto-pilot. I should qualify that. You still have to change the water and mechanical filters periodically (you don't clean out the bio filter because those good bacteria need to stick around), but everything else (PH, Salt levels, algae control) should only need a little tweaking now and then.

Getting there can take a long time, at first. For the first two years we had fish in our pond I nearly always felt like I was chasing something by applying additives to the water. More clarifier (powdered bacteria), more algae control -- which clogs the pump and filters with dead algae -- more acid (our tap-water and rain tends to be alkaline), more water changes (getting traces of Ammonia and Nitrites). It went on and on.

Part of the problem may well have been overcrowding. There's a rule of thumb of 10 gallons per inch of fish. We had put small fish into the pond, but then they grew big.

Also, I had put gravel in the bottom of the pond, but I hadn't rinsed it first. I think there was always a lot of suspended gravel "dust" in it. Then one year the pond had a leak in it, so we had to take the fish out and find the leak. I took that opportunity to shovel out all the gravel and rinse it really good before putting it back in, and that seemed to make a big difference. The water stayed much clearer, much longer and more often.

Then we had a terrible storm in 2003 that knocked out our power for 36 hours. With the pump not working, and no backup, we lost all of our fish except for one, Dreamcicle.

Eventually we added three more small fish. But also, eventually, I seemed to get a handle on things. The water was clearer most of the time. Whenever I tested for Ammonia and Nitrites they measured zero. Even during times I felt I had neglected the pond, like in the Fall, when leaves kept falling in it and I wasn't out there daily getting them out. We have a screen, but it doesn't provide total coverage, so leaves were still getting in. They tend to steep, just like tea leaves, turning the water the color of strong tea, but as dark as it was in color it was still clear. So it looked bad, but it tested good.

And it pretty much stayed that way -- with periodic water and filter changes -- for the next three years. That is, usually clear, no measurable levels of Ammonia and Nitrites, and the fish seemed healthy and happy.

Our fish stay in the pond year-round. The pond is in shade during most of the year, but once the leaves fall off the trees it gets more sunlight than usual. During the Winter, if the Winter is cold, that is not usually a problem until early Spring, when the algae starts to take hold before the leaves return to the trees. And even if it gets a head-start, the usual chemicals for algae control usually do the trick of getting it calmed back down. Then, once Spring and Summer are in full bloom, we usually have plants in the pond that compete with the algae for the same nutrients in the water, and so that also helps keep the algae under control.

So that's good pond mojo: you change the water and filters periodically, and adjust the PH and Salt, and everything else works to maintain a balanced biosphere for the pond and fish.

If only it could have stayed that way.