biosystem

Nature has it’s own set of rules, observes horticulturalist and zoologist Jeff Rugg of Pond Supplies of America. If you work in harmony with those rules, you stand a good chance of being successful in creating systems that support plant and animal life. Work against them, he says, and nature will soon show you the error of your ways. Here’s a look at what it takes to make the balancing act work, from pond sizing to basic equipment and materials.

Practicing Nature’s Balance

It all begins with the water. The first thing anyone approaching the world of ponds needs to understand is that life-supporting water is quite unlike the sterile water found in swimming pools or spas or many other watershapes. A second and related point is that clear water is not necessarily healthy water when it comes to the needs of the inhabitants of the pond. For a pond to be healthy, its water must meet the chemical requirements of plants and fish by having an abundance of some things (such as nutrients) and a near-total lack of other things (such as pollutants). Sanitized water may be beautifully clear, but the fact that sterile systems are designed to knock out nutrients and work chemically because they are "polluted" with chlorine and algaecides makes them completely unsuitable as life-supporting ecosystems. The goal with ponds is to work with nature in balancing the life-sustaining features of the water - and to set things up in such a way that maintaining that balance will be something your clients can do long after you've moved along to another project. To do so, you need to embrace the water-quality basics outlined in the last issue of

The health and welfare of a typical pond or lake depends on a long list of factors – not the least of which, says engineer Erich Altvater, is proper aeration. If you get it right, he says, you can improve water quality; miss the mark, however, and many man-made ponds or lakes will fall into an unwelcome imbalance. Here, he explains what it takes to understand the water’s needs and guide clients to the proper aerating system.

Good Aerations

As the watershaping industry gets more involved with naturalistic bodies of water - particularly large ponds, lakes and streams intended to harbor life in the forms of aquatic plants and fish - it becomes increasingly worthwhile to understand the important role of proper aeration. Aeration is a simple process involving the injection of dissolved oxygen (DO) into water. Nature aerates by way of things such as waterfalls and rain - activities we must imitate by mechanical means in our man-made settings if fish are to be healthy and a host of water-quality problems are