Spring Pond Maintenance

Having a water garden or pond is very rewarding and can add beauty to your garden. But it is essential to keep up maintenance throughout the year, and each season brings new challenges alongside changing weather conditions. As spring approaches, the outside temperature starts to warm up and heaters can be replaced with pumps, which ideally you would have removed from the pond when you turned it off at the onset of winter. In addition remove the netting from winterizing your water garden. If you didnt winterize with netting, its good time to clean dead and rotting leaves that have accumulated during the winter.

If you have fish in your pond its time to start feeding them again but remember not to over-feed them as leftover food will sink to the bottom and rot. Instead, use a net to scoop out the food that isnt eaten within 10 minutes to ensure your feature is kept in good shape.

Around mid-spring, the aquatic plants should begin to come back to life and begin putting on new growth and in mid to late spring you can add new plants. Some plants will probably die out in the winter and need to be replaced, and some may not have thrived as well as you had hoped. If you start seeing a lot of algae this time of year, you can add a barley straw pad to your water garden.

Cleaning and maintaining your equipment is also an important task now theyll be coming into use again. Here are some key tasks to schedule in:
1. De-silt pond bottom, pipework, filter chambers
2. Clean and service pump and strainer.
3. Clean out filter chambers, being careful to dump any stagnant water
4. Service UV and replace/clean parts as required
5. Test water and respond accordingly. Continue to do so upon first feeding.
6. Run in filter and seed if possible with mature media
7. Air pump, diffusers and airline: replace as required ready for later on in the year when aeration will be required.

At Keen Gardener we have a range of service kits for Hozelock Pond Pumps & Filters.