Tuesday, July 06, 2010

More Water Garden (for Monica :)

Monica the Garden Fairie wanted to see the fish in my water gardens, but I'm afraid this is the best I can do. I've switched to "Rosy Reds" from the goldfish of last year, and as you can see not all of these new fish are red (in fact only one was). In other news, this image taken today shows the algae bloom I have going on (I'd added fertilizer made for water plants about a week ago). The right tub is worse (it gets more sun), but the peat/barley extract I use is helping a lot. Plus you can see the plants have grown quite a bit, too....
...progress is good!

6 comments:

Monica the Garden Faerie said...

Cool! How big do the fish get? Can they stay int he pond over winter? And do you scoop algae off like with a pool skimmer-like thing? Color me curious!

lisa said...

I'm not sure how big these fish get, from what I've read they are basically adult size now (guppy size or so). They cannot stay in the tubs over winter because they'd freeze solid, in fact I drain the tubs to avoid damage. The algae gets skimmed off using a wire kitchen hand strainer, and I check for amphibian eggs before I toss any algae :)

water saving said...

Good thing that you love plants so much. However, don't you thing that stagnant water may possibly be the breeding area of mosquitoes?

lisa said...

Nope. The fish eat the larvae before they can hatch.

Anonymous said...

Algae is something that I wondered about. Because of our heat, it really grows like CRAZY in the birdbaths and water buckets...I constantly have to scrub it out of water vessels. How's the algae situation in your tubs now?
v.

lisa said...

I presumed that the sun was accelerating the algae, never thinking about temps. My tubs are doing much better thanks to the peat/barley extract, the left one is completely clear and the right side has improved a lot. Maybe if your water feature is in shade the algae won't be quite as bad?