What Considerations Should I Make When Ordering Plants For My Pond?
Monna - Kettering, OH
3 Considerations to Make When Ordering Plants for your Water Garden:
1.) Hardiness Zone: Another thing to consider when order plants are the hardiness zones and shipping times. Plants are assigned a hardiness zone depending on the type of climate they can tolerate. Choosing plants that will do well in your zone will allow for greater success. Due to the cold weather, we will hold your plant order for you and ship it once your location is past the last frost warning for the season. This ensures the plants ship at a time that is more suitable for travel and save you the hassle of trying to store them until spring.
2.) Variety: There are numerous varieties of plants to consider when ordering. Floating plants such as water hyacinth and water lettuce are great to extracting algae-causing nutrients from the water. Submerged plants such as hornwort are oxygenators that will create oxygen throughout the water column. Also, submerged plants add hiding plants for koi and other fish. Bog/marginal plants such as dwarf cattail or arrowhead add a nice touch of nature to any water garden. Water Lilies of course add beauty and color and like floating plants add shade and protection for koi and goldfish.
3.) Coverage: We recommend adding enough plants to cover 60% of the surface of the pond. This balances sunlight and shade and ensures a balanced ecosystem.
If you are unsure of which plants to order or how many, The Pond Guy keeps it easy with Aquatic Plant Packages.
Filed under: Aquatic Plants, Water Gardens & Features Tagged: | bog plants, floating plants, frost, lilies, plant hardiness, plant zone, pond plants, water hyacinth
I have never ordered plants online before but I guess I will give it a go. I have a pond in my garden and was thinking to add something to enhance its looks and floating plants seem the right choice. Thanks for this informative post!
Your welcome!
I have a question on the floating water plants. Our pond is about 3 ft deep, and 24 x 30 in size. How many do you recommend? I have had problems with the water hyacinth and the water lettuce. We have a rock that spouts wate in the middle of the pond and it seems to damage the plants. Do you have any suggestions? I love these plants but have tried for 3 years with a poor response. Thank you. Linda
Hello Linda,
Usually customers have trouble with their floating plants drifting into their skimmer boxes. We always suggest trying to secure the plants to a secure object or weighted anchor with string (and some floating plant baskets if necessary) to keep them within acceptable zones. You may be able to do the same to keep your floating plants out of the splash radius of your water feature. If the splashing takes up almost the entire surface of the pond you may have to compromise the size of the splash to accommodate your floating plants. We typically suggest 50-60% plant coverage in your pond. If you’d like, you can email some pictures of your water garden to pondhelp@thepondguy.com to request further assistance.