About Me and Sparkling Backyard Garden Koi Ponds
I want you to know a little about me. I am passionate about backyard koi ponds, and my goal is to help you build and maintain your backyard garden koi pond. My first koi pond happened entirely by accident. I moved into a house that had been a foreclosure and had been vacant for over a year. The house needed a lot of work, but the price was good and I was moving up to a larger home. The backyard of the house had a concrete pond that had been abandoned. It was full of trash and debris. We cleaned it out and then I decided as long as we had it, we might as well try putting water in it and get some fish. Little did I know that it would change my life. This one little project took over our lives (in a good way). I searched the internet and bought books to find all of the information I could about how to maintain a healthy pond. What I found was that no one place had everything I needed. But I put bits and pieces together and soon we had a fully functioning pond. This site has many pictures of our pond as it grew over the years. We started out with a submerged pump and filter which had a little fountain that was nice. When we got the water clear, we went down to the store and bought our first koi fish and two goldfish. What we did not know at the time was that our small filter would not be able to keep up with the tremendous amount of waste from the fish or with the amount of leaves that our trees were dumping in the pond. We were climbing into the pond to clean the filter everyday. This was a pain and time consuming, so I went back to the internet to find a larger filter that we could clean and maintain outside of the pond. I discovered the instructions for a homemade filter using a stock tank. The pond also had a beautiful azalea tree in the island in the middle, but when the leaves and flowers dropped into the pond they made a mess and had to be cleaned out. About the same time I decided to improve the filter system, I decided that the azalea tree had to go. So we dug up the tree, and moved it to a corner of the yard. Then we had to decide what to put in its place. I decided that we would add a secondary pond that the filter would flow into and then out into the main pond. With this idea, our two-tiered waterfall and filter system was born. This filter system actually worked out very well and significantly reduced the work involved with keeping the pond sparkling clear. Our koi flourished and even spawned a couple of times. We named our fish and had them eating out of our hands. The pond and the fish quickly grew from hobby to obsession. I want to share the benefit of my experience with building and maintaining a sparkling backyard garden koi pond to help you enjoy the beauty and tranquility for yourself. My goal is to help you by providing one location where you can find all of the information you need to know. If you have questions or suggestions for additional topics, please contact me. I love talking ponds and koi. |
