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Nearing the end of the summer now (in September...okay, basically fall), the pond is a perfect place to take photographs. Here are my two cats, Veronica and Figaro, enjoying the pond. They go outside daily wearing their harnesses and hang out in the vicinity of the pond area. They both like to sit at the edge and view the fish. They have never attempted to "hunt" any of them.

Note how large my hyancyth has gotten. The water lettuce has spread nicely also. However, the lilies have almost no leaves and have not produced flowers since July. I think this may partially be due to the fact that they are too big now for their pots and I haven't bothered to re-pot or add fertilizer. That will happen next year.

In the first photo Figaro is stepping over a bunch of Alyssium, which I think is perfect surrounding a pond. First, miniature flowers like Alyssium do not overpower a small pond and make it appear larger. I can also plant alyssium all around the "front" of the pond, yet still be able to see into the pond out my back window. Even more importantly, because my pond is an oasis for all type of wildlife (birds, frogs, bunnies), I have to make sure that the plants are compatible. Alyssium is one of the few plants I have found that rabbits do not eat. It also comes in a variety of colors - the local wal mart had white, purple, dark purple this spring.

Here is Milton at feeding time. I give the goldfish some "goldfish flakes" from Wal Mart. They seem to like these. I sprinkle them in one area of the pond. So far they do not come when they see me; instead they hide and once they see the food floating around and I step back, they start munching.

My vegetable garden is far away from the pond. Although I do also have sunflowers and cucumbers growing around the pond, the tomatoes are in the vegetable garden. This is the first time I have had a vegetable garden.

I grew them from shootings that my grandma cultivated from seed, and I have to say I am not getting as many tomatoes as I would have if I bought them in the store in spring. This is pretty much my only tomato right now and it is already August. I have about 6 plants and expect a yield of 3 or 4 per plant maximum.

I made a delicious salad with a tomato, a cucumber, and some basil from my garden. I topped it with grated parmesan cheese, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar, with some pepper. I am waiting for another tomato and cucumber to ripen so I can repeat!

I bought some pond plants from eBay (they shipped in a plain envelope surrounded by wet paper towels with padding!) in early June because I couldn't find anything but lillies at the local stores here. Some have been doing great, and some not! I love the water hyancyth and the lettuce, pictured left. They have expanded to about 5 times their size in the two months.

The water poppy and the red ludwiga, on the other hand, have not fared so well. The ludwiga is slightly larger than when I got it, and the poppy keeps having yellow leaves and is not really growing, it has increased only slightly in size.

I know that the former are "floaters" and the latter were planted in soil, could this be the problem? Or, are the hyancith and water lettuce just more hardy? I placed a few on my hyancith into my bio-filter planter and they have grown UPWARDS, looking very healthy. These are even the most healthy of my hyancith right now.

In general, I am happy with all of my plants. I am hoping to overwinter them, but if they do not survive, I will be buying more of the hyancith and water lettuce for next year. They float over the top of my mechanical filter and cover it completely for a more organic look. I spent about $30 for all my pond plants, not including the lillies. I got 3 each of hyancith and water lettuce, another 3 ludwiga and 3 poppy. ALL the ludwiga and poppy are pictured here, while you only are seeing 1/2 of my hyancith/water lettuce collection.

After months of "pea soup" water, I refilled the entire pond and started over. My pond water has been very clear for about 6 weeks now. It does not even have a green tint. Contributing to this success are: my mechanical filter, my gravity bio filter, my trickle tower, and all the hyancith and water lettuce that has finally grown to a reasonable size. Before, I had only the bio filter which I think was having problems because water retention was low - the bucket is small and the pump was going at 450 gph (now it sends half to the trickle tower.) Also, flowers were there but water lettuce which has now expanded to 6 or 7 florets per plant had only one floret each - same with the hyancyth. I would like to isolate the effect to see if it is one thing or all that are contributing, but I don't want to sacrifice water quality to do this! I have only been treating the pond with beneficial pond bacteria (from Petsmart) and no chemicals.

I can see down to the bottom of my pond completely clearly (it is about 2 feet to the bottom.) The fish are visible even from the house through the window. This is amazing to me.

The first photo is of Samuelson, he is only about an inch down. It is hard to catcha nice pic of anyone but Milton, so this was a success. The second photo is my ever-photogenic Milton. He is about an inch down also.

The last picture to the left here is almost the whole crew (missing Samuelson.) We've got the Shubunkin (speckled one) named Nash, below him the little white one is Vernon. Bazerman is higher than everyone else, and you can see Milton's tail below him. Milton is pretty much laying on the bottom of the pond 2 feet down.

I added goldfish to the pond right after my filters were ready - this was about a month ago now. I bought 5 goldfish at Wal Mart - 3 plain ones for 28 cents, and a fintail and Shubunkin for $1.88 each. (you can see the fintail and the head of one of the plain goldfish at left, hiding under some roots from the hyancyth). They have grown a lot already since I have gotten them, and they are almost trained now to come over when they see someone coming to the pond since we like to feed them. They dart around the pond in a little group which is very fun to watch. The Shubunkin is particularly cute, but difficult to see in the water against a dark background. The fintail is one of the most friendly and is almost never scared - I do not know if it just maybe can't swim as fast? The others will usually dart away under the plants if I come too close. I think they have a nice habitat in the pond with all of the shade from the plants that I have.

I adapted Jim's DIY Bio-Filter design for my own bio-filter in my pond. Incidentally, this is similar but more pretty than the ever-popular Skippy Filter. The bio-filter sends water in a PVC piping from the pump into the top of the planter, and then down to the very bottom where it passes through one of those cheap plastic planters with many holes punched in it and the top half cut off (basically, I couldn't find the sieve Jim described so I made do with this.)

You can see my beautiful diagram on left. The spotted thing is my makeshift sieve. You can see the input goes through te sieve and then makes a "swirling motion" in the planter - see Jim's page for more info on that. The blue things are the scrubbies that one would use for cleaning the kitchen, which were not too cheap but I got about 8 for $1, and ended up buying about 6 packs of them - but my filter and pond are small.

I wanted to create a trickle filter for my pond to improve oxygenation and keep the water clear when my bio-filter was not doing the job too well. However, all the builds I saw online were buckets or file crates that had to be hidden away (see one example). Of course, these were also more efficient than mine, which is the one problem I can say I have with my filter build (I provide possible solutions below.)

The basic idea of the trickle filter is to oxygenate the water and send it hrough some kind of filter material. I decided that since my pond pump (Sunterra 450 GPH) can handle the bio-filter with half the power, I will split the rest f the water to go into an "upper pond" that will house the trickle tower. Unlike many of my other builds, this trickle tower was not cheap.

First I built the upper pond. Since I didn't want anything too big and I didn't want it to overpower the actual pond, I ended up buying for $6 from Menards a plastic container that was circular and supposed to be used to keep water in those big barrel planters. I then made a hole in the side and threaded through some wide piping for my output, which goes under the ground and under the rocks around the pond. I could have put the upper pond touching with the rest of the pond and made a stream, but for some reason that didn't really appeal to me this year.

Now for the cool part - I went to Hobby Lobby and picked out a nice multi-tiered plant stand. This planter is one of the best they had because it had very tall walls that can contain my lava rock filter material. It was on sale for 40% off (a sale they have often), but it was still $24.00. I think it was worth the price though. The wrought iron material it appears to be made out of should last a long time. It does have wooden beams for the bottoms of each tier, but I plan to replace those once they rot anyway to get a nicer flow pattern.

I then put the plant stand into the upper pond and supported it by bricks - although it would look nicer without bricks and is quite sturdy stand-alone, I am afraid it may fall. I ran the input up to the top and used an elbow fitting to angle the flow upwards. The flow is only half of the 450 gph, so it is not much, and I can adjust as necessary using my connector by the pump.

I have had this operating, together with a mechanical filter and a bio filter, for a few weeks now and the water is as clear as when I filled the pond (I started over in June after 3 weeks of waiting for a replacement pump caused the water to turn to pea soup.)

Of course, beauty comes at a price. Sending the water such a high distance created a lot of splashing and some of this water splashes OUT of the upper pond. Also, since it is sunny in that spot for most of the day, a lot of water must evaporate while it is going through the trickle filter.

Some remedies for the splashing would be to create a LARGER upper pond which is easy. I will not be expanding this year, but for those starting out this might be a good option. The other evaporation problem cannot really be solved without encasing the entire structure in something, which arrives us back to the original problem of ugly trickle towers.

I made my mechanical filter for around $5, after I realized that my bio-filter was not enough for keeping the pond clean, and I was not in the mood to keep cleaning out the pond built-in filter (which is small and clogs easily). I use it around the pond pump (which is a Sunterra 450 GPH pond pump that came with my "Butterfly Garden" kit). I bought a CD-case from Wal Mart for $0.99 and a non-biodegradable but also NOT fiberglass blue flexible furnace filter for under $3. I used some of the scrubbies that I got earlier at the Dollar General for making my gravity bio-filter as well. In retrospect, I would NOT use this furnace filter because the little furnace filter particles get everywhere and every once in a while I find them floating in the pond. I would stick with scrubbies. I didn't use lava rock because I read around on google and it seemed that scrubbies are pretty much the best filter material. It does not end up clogging up as easily as other material may, and is light, and has more surface area. It has been about a month since this got put in and I haven't needed to clean it at all yet.

First I measured the insides of the CD-case and cut a long strip that went from one side, to the bottom, to the other side, with extras hung over both sides. Then I cut two other square pieces to go on the other two sides. I used a lot of yarn and a non-sharp needle special for yarn (which I had from knitting projects) to quickly sew all the pieces together. I wanted to make sure there were no holes primarily because I was planning to get small goldfish later and I was worried they might get suctioned into the filter.

Then I lowered the pump in, and made a cut on the overhanging part for the output of the pump. I padded the pump all around with extra scrubbies, and "tucked it in" using the overhanging pieces. Then I lowered it into the pond.

I bought 2 containers of waterlilies at Menards for $9.99 each in the spring and plopped them into the pond. This is the first time I have attempted to populate my pond with plants - last year when the pond was built it was late July and far too late to do much. The only pond plants I could find around here (Indiana!) were the waterlilies.

At the beginning of June, leaves finally grew and then by the middle of June I had waterlilies! One is pink (the box said red), while the other is white. The white one has much smaller leaves and flowers, while the pink one just looks amazing. The buds open up during the day but close when it gets too hot in the late afternoon and also through the night...so you have to know their schedule to take photos!

It is now the end of July and they are no longer flowering. I think I should add a packet of fertilizer, although it says there was one included already in the buckets. They are hardy lillies so I will attempt to over-winter them. I am not sure how to do this yet. They were definitely an asset to the pond this year, the most beautiful flowers in my entire backyard!