How to restart a small pond


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Old 04-19-05, 09:59 AM
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How to restart a small pond

we moved into a new house last summer. it has a small pond with a pump that i stored last fall. We also moved the 4 gold fish into the basement tank for the winter.

My question is how do i restore the pond to be able to introduce the fish back to the pond.

Do I just get the pump going again and then put the fish in or is there more to it?

Thanks for your help.
 
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Old 04-20-05, 12:34 PM
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This should seem pretty obvious but in order to start from square one... If you need to clean sludge, mud, leaf debris, etc from the pond, best to do it before you fill it. You might even want to power wash the liner/rocks at the bottom and remove the dirty water before refilling with fresh water. A wet/dry vaccuum works well if you can't hook up your pump to extra hoses to empty the pond.

As long as your pump is working, you should be able to just fill your pond, either allow time for the chlorine in Municipal water to discipate or treat chemically to neutralize it (chemicals to do this are available at most nurseries, garden centres and pet stores) and then move your fish to the pond. You should put the fish in a bucket of water recovered from the tank you have been keeping them in, then putting the bucket in the pond (don't dump the aquarium water into the pond yet) so the temperature of the aquarium water is allowed to cool to the temp of the pond water... usually takes a couple hours, tops. after the temperatures have equalized, you can gently tip the bucket(s) and let the fish swim in their new environment.

You can introduce aquatic plants any time as long as they will tolerate air and water temperatures. I see you are in Cambridge (Ontario, Canada), so we should expect a few more cold nights (even though we did hit 27C/80F yesterday in Toronto), so don't put any tropical plants like water lettuce, water hyacynth, papyrus, alocacia (elephant ears), etc in yet - they could still be killed off in a quick freeze. Your fish will be okay even in freezing temperatures as long as there is moving water that keeps the H2O liquid and a source of oxygenation to let the fish breathe.

Hope this helps

Howie
 
 

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