Testing pond water often causes problems does not solve pond keeping problems

This email is a response to Water Garden's Gazette 405 special dated March 24th 2004

Dear Tony Roocroft,

I'd absolutely agree with you!

A lot of pond and swimming pool keepers trust seller's fairytails about the benefits from the chemistry they sell. If you are the customer, and you are lucky enough, maybe these chemicals will not make any harm to your pond and it's inhabitants. But in many cases even the simplest pond-dye may change some hydrochemical characteristics and shift the pond ecosystem to unstable state. Unstable ecosystem usualy could not be controlled and balanced without professional adwice or even changing all the water. Any owner's efforts to stabilize it using more chemicals in many cases making situation worse according to Murphy's law. From my experience with semi-natural swimming pools, only Zeolite rock or granules working good without bigger harm on ecosystem.

So, in my professional opinion, the best way to keep your pond clean and healthy is to build good biofilter (it could be a special biofilter with aeration or just artificial wetland near the pond (veggie filter ... my comments) - in the best case - both of them).

In the cases of algal bloom some Lithuanian pond keepers use to shadow their ponds by black liner for the period while filter or biofilter fights with the excess of organic matter and labile nutrients.

My special compliments for the phrase "Do not test unless you really must .. and make sure test result is accurate and reliable and you know what it means. pH is especially difficult to measure and understand." It is really so....

Have a nice "ponding" season!

Sincerely Yours

Dr. Ausrys Balevicius

Institute of Ecology

Vilnius University

Akademijos 2

LT-2021 - Vilnius

Lithuania