Thanks, Sam. It will be interesting to see what it reads. I have no plants
in the koi pond; I have some water hyacinth in the waterfall area, but
they're doing poorly. I can think of 2 reasons: a) I had to salt to .12 last
month to protect the fish against a nitrIte spike; it's only back down to
..07 right now, or b) I had tossed the WH in the pond for the koi to play
with. The promptly munched all the roots. I pulled them back out and put
them back in the waterfall pondlets, thinking they would grow roots again,
but hey haven't.

Long story short: I don't have any plants to speak of IN the water, only
around it.

Lee (shooting for Zero!)

"Sam Hopkins" wrote in message
.. .
As long as you dont have any plants that get their nutrients from the
water
column (i.e. you only have plants that are sitting in dirt) you'd want a
phosphate level of 0. Anything above 0 means algae. If you do have plants
that get their nutrients from the water column you'll want enough so that
they are growing as you'd like but that your test kit reads 0. This means
that you need some phosphates otherwise your plants will stop growing, but
not any that you can detect. There's no real way to figure this out other
than trail and error so I'd shoot for the minimum reading that the test
kit
can detect. If it can detect anything higher then obviously it's not being
used by the plants and will only go on to feed algae.

Sam

"Lee Brouillet" wrote in message
...
Does anyone know at what levels phosphate becomes a problem? I'll have a
test kit by LaMotte at home when I get there to test the water, but I
don't
know how much is TOO much . . .

--
Lee B.
See my Zone 9 a/b ponds at:
http://community.webshots.com/user/dragnp