View Single Post
  #7   Report Post  
Old 24-03-2006, 07:53 PM posted to rec.ponds
Derek Broughton
 
Posts: n/a
Default To Compost or Not to Compost

Richard Sexton wrote:

Geez Ingrid is everything you post wrong?

In "Encyclopedia of the water lily" by Charles O Masters
it's suggested you use manure, not loam as loam has very
close to zero nutriative value. You'll still need to augment
with fertilizer spikes.

Loam. Yeee-ow. (shakes head)


Just because it was in a book doesn't make it true, any more than if it's on
a .edu site :-)

I completely stopped potting lilies. The only reason for soil of any kind
is if you have fish that keep nibbling on their roots. Then minimally
nutrient rich is good. Clay works because it actually binds some of the
nutrients, so it doesn't release them into the water as manure does. The
only problem with pea gravel is not that it doesn't provide nutrients -
it's just an almighty pain to try dividing a lily whose roots have grown
around a couple of kilos of gravel! The only thing wrong with Ingrid's
suggestion, ime, is that topping the soil with gravel still ends up with
the roots all around the gravel. It's only there to keep the koi out of
the plant, and I'd use much larger stones (after all, koi can move pea
gravel, anyway).

Manure is a really, really, stupid thing to add to a pond with fish. Fish
provide plenty of their own manure. The last thing you ever want to do in
a fish pond, if you can help it, is to add fertilizer. You want the plants
to take up as much of the nutrients as possible, so that the algae doesn't
get it and so that the fish don't have ammonia/nitrite problems.

I fasten a 6" lily tuber to a rock in Spring and drop them to 4-5'. By
August, they get so large that the tuber is around 18" and the foliage is
so bouyant the rock's a foot off the pond bottom.
--
derek