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Adding Plants to Your Fish Pond
Plants can add beauty and interest to any fish pond but they also help maintain healthy water quality for the fish and other creatures in the pond. pond plants can give you a fish food and shelter and make your fish go right at home in their new habitat. When adding plants to fish pond, you want to think about oxygenating plants, floating plants, deep water plants and bog plants.
One thing you want to consider when looking at plants is how large the plants grow. You don’t want to add plants that will eventually outgrow the size of your pond. Also be sure to find out if the particular plant can survive the winter in your location as bringing them into your home and trying to keep them alive inside the house until spring can be quite messy and inconvenient.
If your fish pond is small, you may consider using pots to avoid any problems with the plants roots. Mesh pots or fabric pond pots are the best to use. The fabric pond pots will allow air to pass through the fabric which is more natural for the planets. Pots will stop soil from leaking through into your pond and muddying it up but will also allow the roots of the plants to get enough water.
To create the best type of pond scape you want to make sure to play its plants for each pond layer as each one of these types of plants performs a different function in the pond.
Deep water plants like to grow in deep water and perform the important function of helping to remove waste from the pond as they use the waste for fertilizer. Using aquatic fertilizers and making sure there is oxygen and sunlight will help these plants grow quickly. Some great deep water plants to use in your pond include Water lilies, Water Hawthorne and Lotus. The Lilies and Lotus like to grow in water that is at least 2 feet deep where the Hawthorne can thrive in anywhere from three to 24 inches.
Oxygenating plants helped to maintain the pawns water quality by providing oxygen and helping to slow down the growth of algae by competing with them for nutrients and carbon dioxide. These plants also provide food and shelter for the fish and other pond life as well as offering a great spawning area. Water Milfoil, Water Buttercup, Hornwort and Water Violet are great oxygenating pond plants.
Every pond needs some great plants that float on the water and these floating plants also help to shade the creatures living in the pond. However, when choosing your floating plants, you must choose carefully as you need to avoid plants that grow quickly such as duckweed as they may cover too much of the pond surface which will prevent photosynthesis thus decreasing the oxygen in the pond which the fish and other plants needs to survive. Some good floating plants include Bladder Wart, Water Hyacinths, Water Soldier, Water Chestnut and Water Lettuce.
Marginal plants are those that grow in the shallows around the edge of the pond and typically like to be in depths of 2 inches to 1 foot. Cattails are an example of a marginal plan which can be pretty but they grow very quickly and will soon take over your pond. Some better choices include Marsh marigold, Sweet Flag, Iris, Golden Buttons, Golden Sedge, Pickerel, Bog Bean, Japanese Arrowhead and Lobelia.
Bog plants are important as they get rid of surplus nutrients thus preventing algae from getting out of control and turning your pond green. They grow on the very rim of the pond and need a very very wet soil. Some bog plants include Lysimachia, Astilbe, and Primula.
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