A Fresh Start

As I’ve suggested a couple times in the brief texts that have introduced the videos in this series on the spring cleaning of ponds, the process we pursue at Pond Digger Waterscape Design & Construction (Yucaipa, Calif.) is filled with opportunities – for minor adjustments, for new additions or, in this particular case, for completely changing directions and rethinking which forms of wildlife should occupy the ecosystem.

Frankly, I doubt the decision this homeowner made to swap out large koi for turtles and goldfish would have been a decision he would have made had he been the one who’d tackled the spring cleaning. This task took a competent, well-trained crew a full day of hard, intense labor, and my suspicion is that if the homeowner had gone solo with the task, he wouldn’t have been able to step back far enough to figure out that a big change was what he really wanted when it finally came time to put the fish back in.

As it was, we were the ones who transferred the fish, emptied the pond, sluiced the rockwork, cleaned the equipment, worked with the plants and reset the clock for another year of trouble-free pond ownership.

One concluding point bears mentioning: As the video shows, this pond works in tandem with a bog filtration system – an approach that works so well and reliably that we really didn’t need to do anything to the bog this time beyond trimming some plants. We recommend using such a system with any pond with a healthy population of either fish or other forms of wildlife: These systems are great for the water, great for the flora and fauna, and great for making it possible for us to walk away knowing the pond will be in good shape when we show up after another year has passed.

To watch is wrap things up with this project, click here.

Eric Triplett is founder and chief executive officer at Pond Digger Waterscape Design & Construction in Yucaipa, Calif. He may be reached at eric@the ponddigger.com.