I use milk crates for my plants. The ones I found, have openings on the top
and on 1 side. You don't need to tie them together with a wire, because milk
crates are designed to be stacked on top of each other, and are quiet
stable.

Any koi small enough to fit into the slots of a milk crate, is small enough
to come back out, so no worries there.

My suggestion would be to make a "deep end" and a "shallow end", so all the
muck settles into 1 side, for easy removal with a vac or bottom drain.

Good luck
Sameer

"Dennis" wrote in message
m...
We are getting ready to dig our pond. It will be 5' deep. Instead of
leaving plant shelves in different areas, since we are not exactly
sure where we will want the plants to be and may want to move them
around and to make the excavation and liner placement easier, we are
thinking of making the entire pond a flat-bottomed, uniform 5' with no
shelves.

Then, we plan to wire each plant pot to a milk crate (or two crates
wired together for more shallow placement of a given plant) and set
the crate(s) on the flat bottom. Can anyone see any potential
problems with this approach? It seems to give us much more
flexibility in plant placement, but we're concerned that maybe we are
missing something???? One concern is that our koi may get caught in
the openings to the crate (like a gill net). We haven't thought of a
solution to this potential problem yet. Any input on this concern or
the concept of using milk crates for plants in general (or a better
suggestion for something to set the plants on) would be much
appreciated. Thanks in advance! Dennis