Stocking Your Garden Pond with Fish

What is a garden pond without fish? Stocking your pond with fish is the perfect finishing touch, but how many fish can you add to your pond? Well, it depends on a variety of things; the volume and quality of the water, the climate of the region you live in, the size and species of fish to be stocked and the available food for the species of fish, are just a few things to consider.

Garden ponds that have been installed with no accessories at all (pumps, filters, etc) in areas that have warm climates should really have no more than two fish of fifteen centimetres per cubic metre of water. Although it is possible to keep fish in larger densities than this, there is a higher chance of them getting sick.

Water quality is another factor to consider. If your garden pond is approximately fifty centimetres deep and is located in shade, and has a good pump at work along with a biological filter, then it would be possible to keep up to nine goldfish of fifteen centimetres in length for each square metre of water without too much worry. Just to be safe in the event of a pump or filter failure though, it is best to actually stock about half this number per square metre of water. If all these conditions are met except the pond is in sun instead of shade, approximately two or three fifteen centimetre goldfish should be stocked per square metre of water.

Another consideration to take on board is the fact that the larger the fish, the more it will pollute the water, so the less should be stocked. As a rule, the length to which a fish can grow is usually determined by the body of water in which they reside. Goldfish, for example, can grow to in excess of thirty centimetres, but they never usually grow more than twenty centimetres in an average garden pond. Going on from this though, you'll find that some particular species of fish will require more space to stay healthy than others, whereas some species can be more polluting than others. For example, Koi carp are much more polluting than goldfish. Some fish species (koi, for example) can live in water that is not as pure for some other species to live in (trout, for example).

As fish are cold-blooded creatures, climate can affect fish activity. As a rule of thumb, fish metabolism increases by twice as much for every ten degree centigrade rise in temperature, meaning not only will they eat twice as much they will pollute twice as much as well. So bearing this pointer in mind, you could keep double the number of fish in a body of water that is twelve degrees centigrade than you can (or should) for water at twenty-four degrees.

Finally, the number of fish kept in a pond should also depend on the ponds natural food chain. The natural food found in a garden pond will vary from pond to pond, but as a rule, two fifteen centimetre fish per square metre of water will survive in some ponds with no feeding by the owner. So keeping numbers down can mean saving on the price of fish food as well as keeping algae to a minimum.