A Green Environment at a Lower Price: Building a Pond Filter
What kind of a filter do you need for your water garden pond? How big does it need to be, and how clean does your little water world need to be kept? These are decisions you need to make when you build a water garden in your yard. It isn’t just a matter of putting in a liner and a pump, and sitting back to relax by your little pond. You want water plants and possibly fish to flourish in the little habitat you’re building to make it both beautiful and inviting. Don’t think of what you’re building as only a hole in your back yard, but understand it for what it is – an eco-system. Building a pond filter will allow you to keep your system clean, and it won’t cost you half as much as it would to purchase commercial filters.
You will want to start out by measuring the area of the pond. You can use a rope for this purpose. You need to know how much area you will be required to filter so that you be sure your filter will be able to handle the job. One way you can lower the requirement for filtering is by adding waterfalls and streams to your system. These will keep moving the water around naturally through the system as well as propel it into the filters. A water garden is definitely a delicately-balanced system that requires all of its separate parts in order to provide for the health of the plants and animals living within it. You have to have a way to filter out the impurities that can damage the environment and encourage the growth of good bacteria that rid the pond of fish waste and organic debris.
There are two kinds of filters you can employ to establish the most optimum pond environment. A mechanical filter will collect debris and contaminants. A bacterial filter, on the other hand, will break contaminants down into forms that the plants and fish can use. To create your own filter, you can start out with nothing but a good-sized plastic pot, mesh bags, large lava rocks, and an underwater pond pump. Fill the mesh bags with lava rocks, being careful not to over stuff. Sit the pump in the bottom of your plastic container, run the tubing and cords, place the lava rocks in the container, and you’ll have a simple but effective pond filter.
