Ask Missy Boo About a Backyard Fish Pond

A backyard fish pond can be a great place to relax and enjoy nature. We built one with a perennial garden surrounding it. It's a great source of pleasure for us to sit by the pond enjoying the sound of the water and the flowers.

We built our own pond several years ago. Now you can buy pond kits and materials much easier. The internet makes it easy to compare kits and pond supplies and even find companies that install ponds. Here's a great place for step by step directions on how to build a pond.

Fish can be purchased very reasonable at local pet stores or online. Koi are a little harder to keep than goldfish. We have 50 goldfish now and we started out with 5 tiny little feeder fish that weren't much more than an inch long when we bought them.

We bring our fish inside over the winter as our pond is only 18" deep and freezes up solid. We have two preformed pond tubs that we fill with water and let set for a couple days. This lets the chlorine evaporate and the water reaches the room temperature.

When the weather gets cold, you have to stop feeding fish. They can't digest food when the water temperature gets below 45 or 50 degrees fahrenheit. Speaking of fish food, here's a great place to find Tetra Pond fish food.

When we catch the fish, we place them in 5 gallon buckets and set the buckets in the same room as the tubs of water for several hours. This allows the water in the buckets to reach the same room temperature so when we place the fish in the tub the water is the same temperature in both the tub and the bucket. It is important when you introduce fish to new water that you allow time for the water temperatures to be the same. The stress of changing temperatures can kill the fish.

Our tubs of water with the fish get quite cold over the winter. We get quite a bit of ice on them but we keep a pump running that keeps a hole in the ice and the fish are fine in the spring. They don't move around much during the winter and don't eat at all.

Kits are available to build a fish pond. For information on Fish Pond Kits, Click here.

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