All about my stock tank pond 🌿 Learning more every day

hey everybody so three years ago i stood in the same spot and i told you i had no idea what i was doing with this water garden i'm gonna try my hand at water gardening and i have never tried this before and now i know like a little bit more so much of what i've learned over the years has actually come from water gardening forums and even the comments of my videos there are very enthusiastic and very knowledgeable water gardening people out there who i've been learning from but it's been enjoyable to learn a different aspect of water gardening so um this is just a stock tank pond here in my vegetable garden i think it's 150 gallons it's four feet in diameter i just bought it from a farm supply store had it delivered and i fill it up i empty it in winter but i fill it up every spring i add some black pawn dye to it to darken the water a little bit i've only added it once this year and it's still looking still looking good you need like a drop of panda it goes a little bit goes a long way i bought a quart sized uh container of pondai well three years ago now and i've used like maybe an inch of it off the bottle it's basically still full so one of the things that i learned is that there's sort of a delicate balance that has to happen in ponds because you can get a lot of scum in them you can end up with them getting stinky your plants might might not grow well so i feel like i've landed in a pretty good place here this year so i want to start this year with this amazing plant so for the first time this year i'm growing lotus now i did a video earlier this year on planting a lotus which was not actually this lotus i planted a second lotus for the for the patio but the method of planting is exactly the same way i planted this in a probably an 18 inch container that i filled the holes on and it's probably i'm just trying to check here the soil level is probably six inches below the below the water here i've got it sitting up on either on a pot or a cinder block or something i can't remember which and this is a large lotus so it's filling up this pot quite a bit and you can see how beautiful it's looking now this was the first flower that bloomed and i'll have to show you pictures of it because the flower only lasted about three days but it was stunning while it lasted and now we've got this gorgeous lotus pod left here which is almost as good as you can tell we've got three big buds here and i thought i saw another bud coming somewhere else but maybe i may oh yeah there is one more butt hiding underneath here and hopefully more buds will continue to come i don't do anything to treat this except i have been fertilizing it i use pond fertilizer tabs with and apparently it's very important that they're with humates i don't exactly know yet why that's so important but i know enough to know that that's important and i fertilize probably every two to three weeks and i think that's why i've got as many flowers as i have is because i am fertilizing quite a bit the other plants i have in here is this basically it's a water oxalis it's a water four leaf clover that i also have potted this one's in a fabric pot that sits up again just above the surface of the water and this is obviously doing quite happy and i actually do stick a fertilizer tab in that every so often not nearly as often and then the only other plant that i have in here is one called hornwort let's see if a bit has this is a this is a little bit of it you can just see it's just this sort of hairy little guy and i've got this pegged down to the bottom just with a rock on top of it but it grows up to the surface here that's important because what hornwort does in a water garden is it absorbs all sorts of excess chemicals that can be in the water so it helps balance out your water now number one question i have been asked over the years is how do you keep this from becoming a mosquito breeding ground in the past i've done two things i've used a solar fountain just a cheap one from amazon and um and you know to keep the water moving a little bit i have no electricity near this garden so i can't run anything that's electric here and any sort of pumps that you have typically need a pretty big solar panel um which would it would take a bit of doing to make that work i'd have to run it out of the garden and run wires from that into here so i have no electricity of any kind here so a little solar fountain which did move the water around it was kind of fun to have in there but i didn't do that this year because water lilies really prefer still water so i didn't want to mess that up obviously this is sort of the star of the show so this year i did what people have been telling me to do for years which is add fish i've always been reluctant to add fish because i was afraid that it would draw in a lot of predators i was afraid of raccoons getting in here and various birds honestly it's not been an issue we had one cooper's hawk once we saw cooper's hawk kind of perched on the edge here plucking some off but that was it he doesn't seem to be around much and i think it's because i bought very inexpensive very small fish i just went to the fish store to the pet store and i got feeder fish i've got three varieties in here i messed up a little bit because the when i went back for more because really this is a big enough tank that it can hold quite a few of these small fish i went back for more and i bought guppies um and what i didn't know and what many of you know and have told me is that uh guppies are little breeding machines so i went away for a week and when i came back to check on the fish they were getting smaller and i thought well how would that be that fish are getting smaller well those would be the babies so there's probably a fairly big population of fish in here right now i have only found about about five dead ones floating on the surface so that's that's pretty good they've all been the the ones that are called rosies kind of maybe two inches long and sort of orangish colored ones those are the only dead ones i've found that's not to say others haven't died that i haven't seen but those are the only ones that i've pulled out which is pretty good because i put in well a lot more than that so the fish have been fun and the water has never been cleaner this water i haven't cleaned it i haven't had to skim it the tank doesn't feel super scummy on the sides so they're taking care of some of the lj too so i'm totally sold on the fish thing now not only that it's also really fun i don't know they're just silly little fish but i do enjoy kind of looking for them and checking on them and whatever but the question is what do you do with them at the end of the year which is why i've never had fish before because i don't have any interest in bringing fish inside for the for the winter this pond gets fully emptied um in part because i'm fairly certain it would just freeze solid here it's not that deep and not that big but also because it's really helpful for cleanup in winter for me to roll this out of the way so that we can actually because we've actually made our paths wide enough that we can pull the um the track the garden tractor with the trailer on it right through here or it's obviously wide enough for a wheelbarrow but it's kind of nice to push this over to the side to just clear this up so that it's very easy to clean this out and keep this clean in winter so that's what we do we've been emptying it every year um so this year the fish my plan is to put them up on like facebook marketplace or i will talk to the pet store first and see if they want them back my guess is that they won't otherwise i will put them on facebook marketplace and see if anyone wants them as feeder fish or to do whatever they want with but what i will not do in any way shape or form is release them into the wild that's really really bad thing to do so hopefully i can just find somewhere where they'll be put to some sort of use as far as what to do with the plants in winter you can overwinter lotus roots out of the water as tubers so i'm going to do some research on how to do that and give that a shot to be honest with you if it doesn't work i'm happy enough with how this plant is performing that if this was only an annual i'd be okay with it i think this was i ordered this load at both lotuses from a place called bergen water gardens online i think this one was like 35 it was not cheap um but i'm i'd spend that again to me that's that's okay to spend on a plant for a year i will try to overwinter it though just to see how that goes and give that a shot this little four-leaf clover guy is is pretty tough and sometimes you can pull water plants out in their pots and you can actually um bury them and like heal them into the garden so i might try that but again this was like this was probably a three dollar plant or five dollar plant so um it's honestly you pay way more for shipping for these if you have to order online if you can't find them locally and then the horn will not um the hornwort i will have to buy new next year so that'll just go in the compost pile and that's basically the care and feeding of my water garden um when we built this vegetable garden i knew i wanted a centerpiece here and the two thoughts i had were either like a little a little patio tape you know like a little table to sit down in although i know how many benches i have around my garden and i know how often i sit in them which is rarely or a little water garden thing and this has been so this is just my place to play i have no expectations because i'm an inexperienced i'm inexperienced at water gardens i have no expectations for what this should be so anything that happens is a success for me and anything else is just figuring well i'm new to this so i'm just learning and figuring it out so that is a very freeing feeling in a garden to have zero expectations for what should be happening in it so you can do what i'm everything i'm doing here in a much smaller form with just like a really big bowl on a patio you can certainly go bigger than this many people do i mean if i had a bigger area i would definitely get a bigger stock tank i did nothing to treat this stock tank by the way i know there's some i've read a lot about there being issues with galvanized tanks i've never had a problem with it it's not the fish are doing fine in it and the plants are doing fine in it so it's never been an issue for me so i this is just exactly this tank is exactly how it arrived to me except i pulled the sticker off the side of it and that's about it okay so i hope if you had some questions about this because a lot of people do i hope you found this helpful and you know i would say this is this to me if there's a lesson for me from this garden it's to just try new things because especially if there's no expectation for having any success with it everything is a success and it's so much fun i this garden this little stock tank pond brings me so much joy and i have so much fun playing with it and i have so much fun trying out these new plants that to me i mean if you had asked told me a decade ago that i could have grown a water lotus in my garden i would have thought you were nuts i literally had no idea you could even do that here in zone five in the midwest all right so that's it from here i hope you guys have a great day in your garden and maybe try something new in your garden today see you soon

Channel: The Impatient Gardener

Views: 29,990

Keywords: stock tank pond, lotus, water gardening, pond, container pond, zone 5, veg garden, gardens, gardening, water gardens, stock tank, the impatient gardener

Id: 7KwL0gK7008

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021