Dancing With Mother Nature

If you nothing more about water gardening, know this much. The secret to enjoyable, relaxing, low maintenance water gardening is found in keeping your aquatic circle of life in balance. In a naturally balanced garden pond, Mother Nature does most of the heavy lifting (maintenance work). In an unbalanced pond, you do most of the heavy lifting. Let’s take a look at how it works.

The Infinite Dance
Now, in a naturally balanced water garden you with start three absolutely necessary ingredients including koi fish, aquatic plants, and aerobic bacteria. In this never ending cycle the koi fish eat the plants, including the available algae. They eventually produce waste, which drops to the bottom of the garden pond. The aerobic bacteria which have colonized by the billions all over the rocks and gravel, cause the waste and any other debris (i.e. leaves, sticks, seeds) to break down, to biodegrade, in other words to transform into a kind of nutrition that your aquatic plants can soak up and use to grow. Then the koi fish once again eat the plants, produce the waste, which gets broken down by the bacteria, and the whole cycle continues infinitely, over and over again.

The Koi Fish
With all that said, you must have enough fish, but not too many. The general rule of thumb in the industry is an inch of koi fish for every square foot of pond surface. More than that constitutes an overstocked pond in which fish waste becomes problematic.

The Plants
You must also have enough aquatic plants, but not too many. The general rule of thumb is that about forty percent of your garden pond’s surface should be covered by aquatic plants, including lilies which give the koi fish shade in the summer, and a source of food as well. Marginal and oxygenating plants also help keep the pond in balance and well oxygenated for all the various life forms in your garden pond.

And The Aerobic Bacteria
Then there’s aerobic bacteria part of the recipe. Aerobic bacteria is a conduit whose purpose in life is to transform waste and debris into usable nutrition for plant life. And as far as too much or too little, you can’t have too much aerobic bacteria.

The Moral of This Story
The moral of this story is that if you keep water garden in balance, Mother Nature will do most of the maintenance for you, so you can relax alongside the pond with family and friends. If your water garden gets out of balance, you’ll be asking for problems that no pond enthusiast ever wants to encounter. “To quote an old TV ad, it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.” It’s not smart either.