Take notice of the clarity of the water.
It's 26-28" deep and you can still easily see the gravel in the bottom
{he said with a puffed chest}.)

A Stunning Red Lily.
I had quite a few of these this summer. Shame they only last a few days.
They are about the size of a saucer or a very large oversized coffee cup.

An Armored Plate Yellow Koi.
This is close to my biggest fish. He is pushing 24".

Bog Iris in the top pond.
A year old and grew to about 4'.
Have some beautiful delicate little flowers but
they only bloom once and then last a day or two. {pre camera too}

Small yellow & white lily.
They are quite delicate looking and are small
(about the size of small coffee cup).

White koi.
He's in the 15" area and is about 4 years old (as are all my koi).
Notice the white lionhead ("The Queen") just above his tail.
As you will see, she's a real camera hog.

Group of fish.
About a dozen goldfish, a couple comets,
half dozen shubunkins, 3 or 4 fantails and, of course,
The Queen.

The Queen.
A closer look. She's about a year old.
Spent the first part of her life in a 4th grade aquarium. Was a hit too.
The lionhead fantail just below her is going on two years old and is bigger than her.
Won't be for long though the way she eats.
The floating food is ......, what else?, Friskies cat food.

I just wish I could have avoided the shadow glare.
Maybe one day I will take a photography course.{sigh}

Stainless Steel Filter.
Last winter I got tired of looking at that old barrel and decided to build one out of plywood and fiberglass it. Well I built it okay and some friends who were fiberglassing their boat offered to do the filter box at the same time. When I got it back it leaked like a sieve, even squirting water right through the sides. I trust they did a better job with their boat (it's not finished yet.) Geez.

So I built another one and another friend (a "fiberglass expert") glassed it for me. This one didn't have (too many) leaks through the sides, BUT ... it started to come apart at the seams. It seems the coloring he used to tint the glass was for water based paints and never let the glass cure properly.
(To be fair I supplied the tinting. Got it are the "right price" (free) from a friend who owns a hardware store. {groan})

So taking no more chances I went to a local sheet metal shop that does stainless work and had this one made.
Supposed to be forever and looks damn good.
Doesn't leak either.

It's 2' wide by 4' long and 2' deep.

The discharge chute.
That's a solid 1/2" wall of water coming down there.
100,000 gallons per day.
The chute is cut on a bias (one side longer than the other) to give a better view,
so the chute is nearly 3' wide even though the filter is only 2' wide.
It's about an 8" fall. I may try raising it to about a foot if I can talk Kevin into it {grin}.

An end view of the whole pond.
The railing is 32" high. You can see the waterfall with the bog Iris on top.
Those are tomato plants in the foreground. My first time with tomatoes.
Probably my last too. Bugs, blossom rot, watering, neighbors' doing better, ... So much easier to buy them.

A couple smaller koi
You can see the bucket my pump is in and the 11/2" pipe coming out. It goes straight into the filter. No turns or elbows of any kind. By increasing the pipe size 1/4" and eliminating elbows (5) in the old piping, the same pump now delivers more than twice the water. It took 21/2 minutes to fill the filter before and less than a minute now with the new piping. I calculated it to be over 4,200 gallon per hour now.

Bears fishing in the waterfall
This picture was taken at night.

Water Hyacinth
A gorgeous flower but it only last one day.

The hose you see is part of a pool pump & sand filter I had hooked up just for fun. It was left over from a previous filtering attempt (Pre Lava Rock). I have since sold them to another Ponder who I convinced to dump the sand and use lava rock instead. Wish I had thought of it sooner and done it myself. Wouldda save me a lot of experimentation with the barrel types (the one I have now is probably model IV or V).

You can see pieces of plywood I had put on each side of the waterfall to try to keep the splash loss down. (I have since done some water redirection which keeps the splash pretty minimal and don't have the plywood there anymore.)

This gives you an idea of how high the sagitaria can grow. It's sort of distorted here though. I promise you I kept it down at the waterfall end. Notice the delicate little white flowers which are mostly spawned out here.

You can just make out the discharges next to the flower pot going into the top pond that feeds the waterfall.

The plants here are sagitaria we planted the first year and they've been proliferating ever since. Gotta keep pruning them back. They get tiny little delicate white flowers just before they pop the spore out. Some of then grow up to 3' tall.

The water here is about 18" deep here and you can see still see some gravel (was mostly mud bottom at this end of the old pond).

Carl's one a the guys I got started. Naturally he did a better job. That's what FORCED me into enlarging mine and putting in the upper pond.{grin}

NOW he starting a BIG one in his back yard (wooden bridges and everything). Don't know what I'm gonna do. Gettin sort of pressed for room. But ...........

You can just see his barrel (about 20 gallons) peeking up behind it. Notice the single sagitarius. It's growing in a small pot. Carl doesn't have any gravel or dirt on the bottom of his pond so the only stuff he has growing is in pots..

The big plant is a cattail. Nothing stops those babies. They overran my pond, grew six feet tall and kept blowing over in a decent breeze (probably because they couldn't get their roots down deep enough. Carl has his in a large flower pot and that seems to contain it. We pick them up growing wild around lakes and such.

A much better Picture (jpeg 83k file)

Yet another picture (jpeg file 61k) from Fred.
Nice Pond Fred!!!