Time to time musings about backyard garden pond building, keeping, troubleshooting. Questions and answers from pond keepers and builders. Occasional excerpts from the pondlady's book, "A Practical Guide to Building and Maintaining your Pond."
Friday, September 01, 2006
Bottom rocks
Many folks and one large pond building franchise advocate covering the bottom of the pond with rocks. I think they do this for two reasons. 1) They can charge much more money to build the pond and to clean the pond yearly, and 2) Some really believe that it will help the ecosystem. During my eighteen years of pond building, I never put rocks on pond bottoms, and in all of the ponds I built and maintained, I never, not one time, had green water.
Each and every time I saw a pond bottom covered with rocks, I groaned because I knew that I had to charge the customer much more money to shovel those stones off the bottom to clean the pond. I usually talked them into not replacing them with the promise that next year's cleaning would cost about half as much - because it took half the time and work.
If you think rocks look nice and don't mind the extra cost of cleaning or the extra work of doing it yourself, by all means put them there. But trust me, you do not need them.
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1 comment:
I posted my response over on my own blog - I've done the bottom thing both ways.
And I don't find it too difficult to get bottoms with rocks to an acceptable clean standard if you simply use a hose-jet nozzle to blow excessive organic matter away.
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