Water Garden in Winter

December 23rd, 2008

Water Feature in WinterBehold! The water feature in winter! It lives!

To recap, this is my new water feature built last spring, want to learn more about it? Start here. This blog post though is about the winter.

What do you need to do with a water feature in winter? Well, what I did was first, I uninstalled the tubing from my bubbling rock. See, I bored a hole down a rock and put a tube attached to the water pump up the hole, the water then bubbles up the rock, coming out, and cascading down the rock into the pool. This would have turned into an ice machine in the winter, so I removed it.

Next, I removed the fancy bell fountain head, you want to keep your fountain going, but you want big water movement, so I removed the head entirely and didn’t replace it, so it is basically at maximum flow.

See, if you have fish, which I do, the most important thing is that the pond doesn’t freeze solid (I hope mine won’t, so far we’ve flirted with 0 and it hasn’t). The second most important thing is to keep water moving on the surface for a gas exchange process that allows the water to oxygenate, non-oxygenated water kills fish as much as freezing them solid would. You can buy heaters to keep a small area of your pond ice free, or do as I do and just keep the fountain on (moving water is far less apt to freeze). The fish enter a sort of suspended animation during this time and don’t need to be fed, but you gotta keep the water oxygenated.

There was an amusing side effect to keeping my fountain on though, as you can see in the below picture at times it build itself a crystal cave where the fountain was entirely incased in ice, it was still moving inside the ice, but it was cold enough that eventually the water being spurted up froze to form a dome around the fountain.

Crystal Cave

Posted in: Gardening » 

7 Responses to “Water Garden in Winter”

  1. Judy Lowe/Diggin' It  Says:
    December 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am

    Love the “crystal cave” photo! It seems to me that because every winter is different, what needs to be done to the water garden — and when — is always different, too. But maybe that keeps it interesting even when the pond is almost frozen over sometimes.

  2. gardening hat  Says:
    January 14th, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    looks kinda like a frozen snail 😉 i cant wait until winter is over and i can start on my garden again 🙂
    -jessica

  3. ck  Says:
    January 21st, 2009 at 10:07 am

    after reading through your blog, you clearly have a beautiful garden and take pride in this. i think most people would agree that this adds to all including of couse the community around it.

  4. Judy the Herb Grower  Says:
    January 27th, 2009 at 12:59 am

    Your garden’s water feature looks so beautiful in the snow. It’s a real shame we don’t get snow from the area I am from. Your fountain also looks really amazing it looks like one of those fancy ice sculptures.

  5. Greenfingers  Says:
    February 20th, 2009 at 8:11 pm

    Nice water garden! It really dazzles. Wow I hope could’ve seen them in person. Nice break from gardening during the holiday season. Hope you enjoyed it. 🙂

  6. Libby | Wall fountains  Says:
    February 25th, 2009 at 11:18 am

    These are great pictures. I had no idea about the fish and the ice freezing over. Living in Phoenix, Arizona I have to travel for a couple of hours to enjoy the beauty of winter. Thanks for sharing your pictures.

  7. Country Koi Fish Farm  Says:
    July 7th, 2009 at 8:05 pm

    Yes pretty cool picture indeed! I know on a large pond I have we keep the pump going in the winter too and it makes a pretty cool ice sculpture as well.

    How deep is your pond? You always have good luck overwintering your fish?

    Nice blog! Will stop by again.

    Sincerely,

    Jamie Boyle
    Pond Enthusiast

Leave a Response








(Email field must be filled in)

Top of page...