Six

Every year my bf and I put together some sort of tub pond on our condo deck. We don't have the space for a "real" pond, and honestly, I like this anyways.

Here's a pic of one of last year's mini tubs:

We bought a ceramic planter from Garden Ridge in W. Columbus, Ohio, patched the holes in the bottom and latex-painted the inside for it to hold water. We then put some plant soil in and planted some collected Potamogeton species and some put in some Phyllanthus fluitans.

year before last:



Last year's main tub (100g). We always put out some species of pelvicachromis to see how they fair. usually with some dithers. last year, i forget what pevic we put out, but we put out our figrati danios and they almost all jumped. dumb fish. here's how it looked last year:


which attracted a lot of wildlife:


(damselfly)

(")

(")
and just looked cool:



This year, we put out another lotus (our staple plant), albeit a little late. We got poopy results. a few leaves and no blooms. our deck faces south and we get morning sun. BUT, we did make an interesting choice. We put out a red tiger lotus (Nymphea zenkeri) . You know, those flimsy-leaved red bloched plants that cost about $10 in the store. Soon enough, that thing was putting out emersed leaves. then a lot of them. then they were as big as dinner plates!! The thing was loving it outdoors- absolutely!

Here's some pics I took this week of the bloom it popped out. The most amazing thing was how THICK the stems to the leaves and flower were! Amazing!






Pretty awesome for such a pansey plant!

Thanks for reading

6

Mud Pie Mama

Very, very NICE! Thanks for sharing your pics. You've taken some really beautiful photographs.

These pond tubs are a fun and enjoyable summer project. I've done a 20 gallon whiskey barrel tub; but I've not been brave enough to try 100 gallons!

Have any of your fish breed in your outdoor tubs?

Six

We put some endler's out this year that were an impulse buy at our club auction (hehe) and they did great! We ended up pulling them a day late and they all died from temperature issues outside. We still, hopefully, have our Pelvicachromis humilis outside. We're bringing them in as soon as we get space in the fish room. Too many summer purchases and we ran out of space. We're planning to sell the pair if they didn't breed out there. They've been very irritating.

A lot of local people breed rosy barbs and other schooling fish outside in tubs. We don't keep many of those species. We did, however, accidently get some rainbowfish eggs on some plants and raised those outside. They did great on the natural food!

cs_gardener

What nice looking tubs! They're quite inspiring, I may have to try something like that some day. I love the lotus flower and it's so interesting to see the emergent leaves sticking up so high. Do you have any problems with animals coming by and going fishing?