I will be putting my pond to bed for the winter in the next couple of weeks. It is usually between Thanksgiving and the first week or so in December when I do this. Will be salting the pond this weekend.

What do you all do in preparation for the winter with your ponds? I know different areas will have different things they do.

Today I will be cutting back my bog plants. We salted our pond yesterday - I already am missing the pond and summer. I love feeling the heat of the deckboards under my feet in the heat of the summer.

Generally we starting bringing in the pumps and pressure filters between Thanksgiving and the first week of December. We will also be putting in 2
de-icers. I did take the temperature of the pond yesterday and we are at 39 degrees. I expect that temperature to rise some today and tomorrow as we are supposed to be in the 60's

I would love to know what is going on in your ponds.....

It's still very much fall here in Houston area. The leaves are falling and my ponds are filled with leaves. I have to get in there and clear them out. But I know the Koi burrow into them when they hibernate. Hmmmm, what to do???

Cheryl

How cold does your water get in the coldest part of winter?

We pulled our pressure filters and uv lights the last weekend in November. The deicers went in at that point. I checked through my pond journal and we have shut down over the years, anywhere from November 22nd to December 10th.

March is when we typically start up and that seems like a long way off. I remember one year start up was as late as the first week in April.

Hi Carolyn, Just pulled the last of the pond plants (the ones that are in the smaller water features). We over winter some of them in the deeper Bird Bath pond and move the fish to that pond as well. Then remove most of the water and plants from the other water features. Those plants get burried in the Veggie Garden till spring. Tell me more about salting your pond. Does it help with freezing and do you have fish in that pond? It isn't something that we have looked at before. I usually keep a pond heater going over the winter. The salting might be a good option for the other water features. Even though we start out with them pretty empty they usually end up with some additional water from rain and snow fall.

Oh, I have pulled the Trop WL and stored them in containers of damp sand like I did last year. I had some luck with that. Saved 3 of the 5 I put away and they bloomed for me this past summer.

Holly

How have you been? Why do I think you are zone 6? We salt the pond so the fish will go into the winter with a nice slime coat. We used to have problems with fish health at start up in the spring until we started salting the pond. Knock wood, every year we have salted the pond, the fish have come through the winter quite healthy. Then the salt levels are brought back down to 0 in the spring with the water exchanges.

I cut back my bogs and the waterlilies are already in the bottom of the pond. The one time we tried the tropical waterlilies, the fish seemed to think it was some type of delicacy and ate the plant down to roots.

Yep I am in Zone 6. The line for 6a or 6b runs right thru our area so I am not quite sure which Zone 6 I am in. LOL

Did a Hardiness Zone search by zip code and they say Zone 6a.

Holly

Do you have any pictures of you waterlilies? I would love to see them.

Not too many, The laptop crashed this summer and I lost about a years worth of pictures. I do have most of them backed up but the back up system isn't very user friendly. You can only pull up one pic at a time and there is no rhyme or reason to the order in which you get them. So this is all I have.

They are so beautiful, Holly. I know what you mean about losing pictures in a crash. That happened to me a couple of years ago. It was when everything was back up and running that I started looking for back up systems to my computer.

Thank you for sharing those lovely photos. Do you know if they have a fragrance?

Not sure about the fragrance. Well I am lucky that I have most of my pictures backed up but it will take months to organize them in folders again. Right now all I can do is pull up one picture at a time to look at it. With no markers to let you know what pic it will be.

Holly

do you know the name of your waterlily?

Maybe Panama Pacific or Tina, They both look very similar. The leaves on PP are very large.