Maintaining your Backyard Pond during Temperature Drops
Maintaining your backyard pond in the winter months works a little differently than during warmer weather. Great Lakes Pondscapes stays prepared for every seasonal change by stocking and supplying the necessary items for our ponds. To keep your pond healthy and your fish safe when it starts to freeze, it is important to know the steps for proper pond upkeep.
De-Icer
To allow harmful gases to escape your backyard pond, you need a hole in the ice. This is not done through any sort of banging on the ice because this causes soundwaves that can be very harmful for your fish. Instead, use a deicer to melt the surface or a pot of boiling water.
When purchasing a deicer, you should get a quality and higher powered one to ensure that the hole remains open through the winter, so your fish have a healthy environment to hibernate in. Deicers do use a lot of energy, so it is not necessary to leave it on continuously – just watch the aeration hole and if it begins to close, turn on your deicer for a few days. The only exception is if you leave for a week or more, leave on the deicer to act as a back up in case of aerator failure. Don’t want to come home to frozen fish!
Water Treatments
Keeping the water up to quality level is just as important during the cold months as it is during the rest of the year. Maintaining proper quality is just as important as any backyard pond maintenance, especially in the winter. To keep bad bacteria at bay it is a good idea to add a winter bacteria blend to your pond to prevent any type of potential buildup that can occur. This includes the breaking up of debris that could hurt your pond’s ecosystem.
Fish Care
Do not feed your fish during the winter! Although it may seem like you need to, fish naturally slow down their digestive systems during the winter months, so you do not need to feed them. They cannot properly digest food while in this state, so feeding them could kill them if it gets lodged in their systems. Even if the weather warms up and they seem active, do not feed them until spring when they end their dormancy.
It is also important to keep enough oxygen in the pond for your fish so they can breathe and not freeze. So, make sure you have a bubbler pump to keep your fish from freezing. If you have koi fish, it is especially pertinent to maintain proper oxygen.
If you have any questions about proper backyard pond maintenance, contact Great Lakes Pondscapes today and we can answer them.
