Best liquid organic fertilizer

[DavidCampen]

Originally Posted by rosemadder

There's a multitude of ways to test aquarium/pond water. Fish are much more complex, sensitive organisms than plants, and good water chemistry is crucial to keeping them healthy. Bad water will kill fish quite a bit faster than it kills plants.

We can test everything from pH to TDS and ORP, general hardness, carbonate hardness, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, phosphate, copper, iron, dissolved oxygen, carbon dioxide, chlorine, etc etc. Unfortunately other things are not easy to test for-- potassium for instance, and most micronutrients.

There's a huge amount of information available if you look up planted tanks, aquascaping, aquaponics, and so on. The water that will keep aquatic plants happy can feed lots of other plants too!

So what sort of TDS is usual for a decorative fish pond? How do you keep the TDS below that of tap water?

Edit:
From a bit of searching on the web I see that some people do install large RO units to supply water for their ponds in order to keep the TDS down but then I would still rather use the RO water and add my own well defined nutrients.

[Leafmite]

Yes, if you invest in the expensive fancy fish, the prized lilies, lotus, and 'bog' novelties, then spend many hours a week caring for the pond, you tend to worry quite a bit about water quality. The plants and fish are highly dependent on what is in the water. I even had a microscope and prepared slides to make certain I had a healthy ecosystem. Being outside, exposed to everything, if one has a problem with water quality, things can go downhill very quickly. I had the pond thirteen years then downsized to a barrel pond after a neighbor's cat developed a taste for my very tame fish.

[rosemadder]

Very quickly. Yes. I once had a pH crash that annihilated half of my fish in the space of 2 hours.

Also nothing quite like wandering outside half-awake to feed the fish and finding yourself eye to eye (and I am not short!!) with a great blue heron 3 feet away and like 1" wide, pretending to be a stick with big yellow eyes. Until it realizes you've seen it, and then the 6' wingspan comes out. Good morning!

My current yard is infested with raccoons. I don't have the space for a proper koi pond like I used to have back home, but I want to throw in a 200-gal container for Wakin goldfish, too tall/steep for critters to hop into. I'll get a Scarecrow as well, see if that helps.

And I want a lotus SO BAD. I'd love to put a dwarf one in my indoor tank, as well.

It's interesting, in the koi community there's this huge stigma against plants-- they don't want ANYTHING in the water with the fish. No substrate, no rocks, definitely no fertilizer, etc. Then after I lost my pond and was forced to switch over to an aquarium I ran into planted tanks (just have a look at Aquaforest here in SF, omigosh) and there's no going back.

The plants in my aquarium feed and grow so fast that I have to supplement the nitrates from a separate compost-critter tank!

I'm actually pondering adding some Malaysian trumpet snails into the reservoir of a S/H pot to see how they like it in there. Or maybe there's some kind of worm or other crawly critter that could live in the damp portion above the water, eating algae and such. That would be awesome.

[MattWoelfsen]

After reading this thread, I went to Amazon and found a product labelled "Organic Liquid Fish and Kelp Blend". It is produced by a company called GS Plant Foods. Reviewers gave it four+ stars, so I figured this was a good place to start. This product arrived last Friday (05/31/2013). I was going to water all my plants but it has such a strong fish odor that I've staged watering by sections, allowing plants to dry and diminish the scent before I watered another set of plants.

[Leafmite]

A dwarf lotus could easily live in a two hundred gallon pond. My pond was 5' x 6' x 23" (zoning meant a pond had to be under 24") and had a Mrs. Perry D. Slocum as well as another, medium-sized, that's name was forgotton. I have been missing my lotus and might buy another tub and put a lotus in it. No need for a pond but mosquito control is a neccessity (dunks, bettas, or small goldfish). Raccoons can get into nearly anything, unfortunately, and netting just gets torn/chewed through. A raccoon isn't likely to bother a lotus in a tub, though.

[rosemadder]

Back home I was using a 100-gal Rubbermaid tub for my smaller fish. Those are 2' deep. For a while I also used one of those 1500-gal backyard pools with the inflatable rim, which was even taller. The neighborhood raccoons actually made a visible path past it on one side, so many footprints from their daily travels to and from the river nearby-- but they never touched the fish, and I never bothered with netting. The Rubbermaid tub's upper edge is too narrow and rounded for them to climb or perch on, and the water is too deep for them to stand in if they did manage to climb in. Raccoons like to hunt waist-deep in the water, feeling for fish with their hands, and herons hunt while wading knee-deep. Vertical sides at least 18" tall/deep can be pretty effective at preventing predators from having a comfy perch to hunt from, raccoons and herons at least-- certainly wouldn't stop osprey I suppose, but they've never visited. In 4 years I never lost a fish, until one winter the water level in the inflatable pool got too low and the sides slumped-- letting that heron walk in. At full depth, it was impervious. Even though a big heron is definitely more than tall enough to look over the edge of any tub, for some reason they don't like trying to strike from that angle.

Of course that means you may not want an edge around the pond that you can sit on, or put plant pots on-- and you don't want a shelf or pots in the water near the sides for a raccoon to use as a foothold to stand on. Bog planting areas would have to be limited to keep herons from using them.

If the container is short enough for them to climb in, they absolutely will though. I have a small like 5gal tub of water on my patio that has a few extra pieces of driftwood and java fern in it-- raccoons come almost every night to crawl around in it, wash in it, and look for snails to eat. It's a downright nuisance, actually. They've been digging up my calla lily bulbs and gloriosa lily roots, knocking over my plumeria cutting, uprooting my fescue plugs, and overturning my violets. Sheer luck that they haven't mangled my dendrobium kingianum yet. Definitely want a Scarecrow out there as soon as I can manage it.

[Leafmite]

That sounds terrible! The lotus might be a trick then. Unlike water lilies that like to be planted deep, lotus likes to be planted close to the surface. The lotus tuber is pretty delicate at first because the growing tips don't regrow if broken so you may need to cover the tub with a cage or something sturdy to protect it until it is established. Just a note: Follow the directions on fertilizer. They are heavy feeders but you have to wait each year until the tuber is growing well.
They are really special plants. If you do flower arranging, the pods are really cool though you wait until the stems have dried to remove them (water getting into the hollow stems is a no-no). The seeds and tubers are said to be edible so when you run out of friends who want to grow lotus....

[Cym Ladye]

We seem to have drifted a bit off topic, but to keep a smaller pond for the water it will be necessary to stop blue herons and raccoons. I have discovered two remedies which work:

Raccoons - invest in a product called "Fido Shock". It is essentially a low voltage electric fence system with 100' of wire and 12 green plastic stakes. It is unobtrusive when placed at about a 10" to 12" height around the pond and once hit with it, the racoons leave it alone to the point you can turn it off and just leave it there as a reminder.

Blue Herons - this solution is not as unobtrusive, but it definitely works. For the smaller pond, lay a piece of 1" x 2" 14 gauge wire fencing over the pond. Although the herons conceivably could get their beaks into the water, they cannot open them to get the fish. This fencing also thwarts raccoons if it is anchored down a bit with some attractive "lightweight rocks" so it does not shift around. My pond is 400 gallons and it has been raccoon and heron safe for 15 years.

Cym Ladye

[rosemadder]

Yeah a tad off topic I suppose... but if people want to make liquid fertilizer at home, there's gonna be water involved, and probably a large container of it. And if it's outdoors with mosquitoes and all, there will probably be fish, and, and...

The Scarecrow I mentioned earlier is a motion-sensitive sprinkler. It sprays whenever it sees something moving (sensitivity can be adjusted). Nice thing about it, is it's not very obtrusive like a large barrier-- just don't forget to shut it off before you go to feed the fish!

[DavidCampen]

Originally Posted by Cym Ladye

... If you have ever been to any areas where orchids grow wild, the condition of the plants is far less than the optimal state us hobbyists would like to see in our collections.
CL

Such heresy! The "fact" that orchids grow much better in the wild is one of arguments used over at Slipper Talk to explain the need for "K-Lite". I once stated the opposite and one of the rabid defenders of "K-Lite" asked if I had ever been out of the city.