Oklahoma Ecosystem ponds, like everything else, need maintenance. If you’re interested in the least maintenance possible, then be sure you install both biological and mechanical filtration on your pond. The biological filtration will tend to your water quality, while the mechanical filtration will do the skimming for you. If you don’t HAVE a skimmer, then you ARE the skimmer. Emptying skimmer basket or net will take only a couple of minutes a week.
During the summer, pond maintenance in Oklahoma mostly consists of keeping the aquatic plants from taking over the pond! You will need to do some trimming a bit during the summer and what better place to do some gardening than standing in a pond! If your pond is well-built, getting in and out of it should not be a problem.
Aquatic plants need to be trimmed and thinned regularly or they will overtake the pond. Depending on the size of the pond and the amount of plant life, this could take as little as 5 minutes a week. If you let things get out of hand, well, that’s another story.
During the winter months in Oklahoma, you will get algae blooms because the other aquatic plants are dormant in the cold water. We don’t freeze as much here as they do in other parts of the country, but the water gets cold enough to shut down the growth of aquatic plants for a few months. Algae is just a weed, and is not temperature sensitive, and it’s usually the first weed in the garden (water garden, that is). You can simply hand-weed it out (which makes a fabulous addition to a compost operation). We DO NOT recommend using anything during the winter months other than cold water bacteria.
Pond maintenance is not a big task. However, if you want a “no maintenance” pond, we can do that as well!