Plants for watergardens, water treatments

Nobody but nobody grows plants with their Koi, eh?  First time posting though I keep up with the newsletters.  I already know the answer to the question, but just in case someone out there may have the inclination to do acutal wtergardening and not just grow Koi for shows, read below my present methods and my questions:

Kindly listen and give me a break....I do love water gardens....not just a Koi pond, though the only fish I have are Koi, though most of them are of the long finned king.   I'm down here now in Texas and it seems to be a must to grow waterlilies for extra shade.  The last two years here it's been mighty toasty but this year things have changed.  We've have abundant rain...(so far)....and in my 4000 gallon pond (small by comparison of what I had back home)....which is an approximate 15 by 25 foot span from side to side, end to end, I finally have achieved what I would call perfect water conditions in the way of clarity.  Two + years is what it's taken.  Or it could just be that we have had an abundant cloud cover for these last two months.

I do have one UV light which has been 'on' since spring.  So I imagine it is 1/3 to one half of the way through it's productive life by now.  The water clarity is wonderful and I attribute most of this to the fact that I now have 8...yes, I said eight fully mature water lilies growing and blooming.  This gives me a greater than half coverage of the pond for shade.  Or is this success simply because it is the second year for the pond?

I also have miniature cattails, a small lotus, miniature papyryus and a few other marginals which are now well established.

The first of this spring I used Clarity Max, with activated barley, several times.....I also used Clarity Max's D-Solve (which I think is now sold under a new name) for that awful old algae that always blooms from the bottom of the pond in columnar forms.  These products did the trick and now I am able to achieve pond clarity without using any water treatments of any kind, except for declorination and adding some salt.

I do want some new ideas on what your favorite product is for declorination.  I make many water changes and do use a lot of de-clor.  When back in Oklahoma I used Aqua One de-clor....but I am using Tetra Ponds declor now which I think adds a really good protection for the slime coating of my fish.  What say you?  What do you use?  And, what is your source?

I am out in the country, so to speak, so I do mail order in my pond treatments. 

Thanks for any input....

Nancy Fernandes

NancyFern

Hi Nancy, I think one of main reason for some of us not having plants is because when we build out pond:
we have no shelves, we want as much space as possible for out koi the deeper the better, we try to keep everything out of the pond that can collect gunk and also hurt a koi, then on top of that they will dig them up and mess up our mechanical filters, and when we do treatments we do not have to worry about killing all the plants. It is not because we do not like them, most of the people that keep koi around here have a koi pond and then a small pond to keep gold fish and plants.
Going back to you question:
I use ClorAm-X and we use it for our show it is a great product to neutralized chlorine and bind ammonia. It is like Amquel but more ecomical. Hope this helps, to find the lower price just go to google and type its name

It great to hear from you, and that your pond is doing great.

Jesus

Jesus Brito