Are you ready? Ready to party? Oh, yeah. Come on, everybody. Let's go to Joe Strimchag.com.
Yes.
We're having a wood party, everybody. We're getting in Malaysian driftwood. Yes. Go to Joe strim shack. Use promo code Aquarium Guys to check out from 15% off and free six inches of Jollo wood for a limited time only. disco. disco. Yeah. Go on and party over to joe's Shrimpshack.com, where the real beats are. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson. All right, guys, welcome to the podcast. So this week, Jimmy got to pick what we're doing. So for those that don't know, I want to give you a little bit of background after we do introductions. I'm Rob Zulson.
I'm Jim colby.
And I'm Adam Elashar.
So to give you a little background on how this podcast works is you get to hear us giggle, crack jokes, get all these wonderful guests. We are very blessed as a podcast.
Very.
We get and there's a lot of background work. It's not just an hour and half a that we sit around here bullshitting. It's a lot of work going in through editing. That's why we have Scrap, the editor. Thanks, Scrap.
Thank you, Scrap.
No problem.
And the other part of it is the amount of effort and time it is to curate the content. Like for those that no matter what content you do, if you're a content creator, I want right now to reach back and pat your right shoulder, because you deserve a pat on the shoulder. Content creation takes so much time and effort beyond just editing. Just coming up, the material is difficult and playing phone tag with people for guests. So you want to know what? We do it's one and a half hours a week and then times it by all the free time we can find to wrangle in content. So Jimmy got to pick it. This week, I decided to help me out, relieve some pressure.
I pulled it out of my butt.
And it was a great topic, in my opinion. So today we're going to be going over patio ponds.
Oh, I was thinking it was going to be the first one I picked.
Licking Frogs.
Yeah. What frogs did with that one. I was good with that one, but Rob shot it down right away.
Bastards.
What?
Licking frogs? The podcast.
Toad licking.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The amount of time it takes to get stupid ideas like that. What kept out of the podcast alone is just all my time. Excellent choice. So we're going to dive into that in a bit. But if everybody wants to join these podcasts, we've been trying to do them on mondays last two weeks. jen went in the hospital. Now, this week, my wife's car had an engine fire and blew up on the highway.
Blew up, sir.
So we're doing our best to do these mondays at seven Central. Come join us in discord. Go to aquariumgepodcast.com. You can come listen to this live. It's the only way you can listen to it live right now until spotify becomes a video thing. But come join us. And adam's got his camera on and might we say you look mighty flights. You like that? Like sexy ass. 05:00 shadow. Like you should be in some underwear commercial.
You should take your shirt off and just show us your peck.
Right? And then you got sexy off shades like he owns stock and Dubai or something.
He looks like that. Yeah, I go with it.
So now that we've officially turned the brown guy red, jimmy, you got any news this week?
I am just super stoked. I've got some new coy coming on Friday.
New coy?
I have some new coy coming and they're going to hand pick them and they're going to send them in for my pond. And so I'm super excited about that. And finally I can evict my four to five inch comments that were just in there as an experiment to see if they do okay. And now we've got some corey coming in from Ozark Goldfish out of Missouri. They offered to go out and hand pick them for me today, which they normally don't do, but they said because it's for you personally, we'll do it. Well.
I mean, it is the colby. You give what naked man wants.
Exactly. So my news is I got some new coy coming in, going into my pond. My pond is doing quite well. I bought a nice filter for robs and we did some plumbing over there and we're going to do a little more plumbing before the fish show up. The garden around the pond is doing very well and we got a couple of inches of rain last night and everything's looking pretty green around here, so pretty excited.
What color are they? Are they those cow coy?
You'll have to wait and see.
You're not going to tell?
No.
We're going to have to have Ozark on the podcast so we can yes.
I think we can probably talk and.
Give your ordering secrets.
Yeah, we actually get to talk to them. If you want some good quality goldfish out there, ozark Goldfish do a wonderful job. You can buy some four inch comets that are beautiful for under $0.50, turn around and retail them for 799 and make a lot of money.
These are wholesale only. You have to be a pet store or wholesaler to be able to purchase from these people. So if you're a pet store and looking for the best coin goldfish, they got to sponsors first before you order.
So wait for that. We ain't giving them a plug until they send us wonderful people, great people. I've been dealing with them for about ten years.
All right. Is that for news?
That's all I got. Well, my tropical Fish hobbies magazine that I was bragging about that seagull Farm sent me over the weekend. Our cousin's dog was over and he chewed up the whole damn thing.
So now there's still no proof that it exists.
Oh, yeah, I got pictures. I showed sent you guys pictures about that. But Tropical Fish hobbyist magazine since 1955, I think I said, or 1952 is still out there, and they're doing both saltwater and freshwater in one issue. So check it out. It comes out not bi monthly every two months because bimonthly would be twice a month. So six times a year it comes out.
I'm glad you're figuring this out.
Shut the hell up.
So we got a couple of dog collar.
Oh, damn it. See, it's been a damn it, Bobby. We're not back on Monday. So, yeah, we're going to hook Rob up to a dog collar, and we're going to shock everything that says something nasty.
I mean, normally in my life, Tuesday nights for the electric shock and whips. But I mean, we can do some things.
Whatever you and your wife do up in Circus Circus over there, which they call their bedroom. Circus Circus.
Safe words oklahoma.
Oklahoma.
Coming through.
It heard the safe word.
That's the safe words. Oklahoma.
All right, so we got a couple of messages from fans. If you guys got questions for us or want us to read something profound on the podcast, would your mom ask messages for you guyspodcast.com? Again, people have really taken that little note of our telephone number on the bottom of the podcast is textable, and people went kind of ham with it. So people sending me text messages left and right. So we'll grab a couple, but we got a couple of good questions. What are some ways to combat high PH? Hard tap water for your aquarium. My local PH is 8.2 at the tap.
Oh, cement.
Holy shit. Jimmy hit me.
Cement.
Actually, that's about what my PH. I'm sitting at 82884. It used to be nice and soft, and then I think Jimmy shit in the pool. And now I get nothing but crap anymore.
It used to be nice and soft. Now it's hard.
Please cut that out. Yeah, please cut that out.
The truth stands tall. It's easy.
So what do you do about it?
What do you do? I would just hook up my Ro unit. I own two of them.
Well, I mean, let's talk about the methods, regardless of our endorsement of those methods. So number one, right? Deal with it. My favorite.
Deal with it.
Shut your mouth. Quit worrying about PH so much. There's only a specific handful of species that you absolutely can't have on high PH. Right now, I'm looking at a discus that's been in my tank for quite a long time. And he's sitting at that 8.4 mark for PH when they're supposed to be like a six flat. He is thriving happy in the tank. And that's one of the more expensive, quote unquote, delicate fish that people have. So those of you that have different range of phs and it doesn't match the fish, slow, acclimation fish can handle a wide range of conditions as long as they are not introduced abruptly, as long as it's slow, gentle, acclimation. So again, the best thing, like you said, Jimmy, is Ro unit. If you guys have an Ro unit in your house, you can really clear out that PH for you. But again, it takes a lot of water to make a gallon. Or ro water.
Yeah, my store likes to play with PH up and down, and I tell them to quit using that crap because it does a nice job. It will drop it or raise it, but if you don't pay attention, three days later, it swings back to where it was, and it's like having somebody hold the back of your shirt collar and just kind of jerky around every couple of days. And that's what's really stressful in fish is when the stuff swings back and forth so it does what it says it's going to do, but it doesn't hold true unless you keep on top of it.
What I recommend doing is if you have a way to get access to maybe a reverse osmosis Ro system from your local grocery store, test their PH and buy a few gallons and do water changes. So the first water change, you have 75% soft water. Next water change, 50% soft water. Third water change, 25% soft water until you acclimate those fish into being used to your tap. Once they're on the tap, they're consistent. You can change water whenever you feel like it. You need to without any cost or hesitation. And you're not, like you're saying, spending tons of money on medications that only last temporarily that will oxidize out of your water.
The other thing, too, with things like PH up and PH down and stuff, if you just leave your hard water on there, hard water tenderly will then start staining your tanks, and your tanks start looking terrible. Lies.
None of my tanks are stained. Don't look at the one.
Everything in your house is stained.
Rob scott feldman told me to make that brown water. So my fish go blub. Yeah, so ignore that one, but the rest are clear.
But when you get really hard water and you start stating on stuff, it might be time to ask yourself, do you want a water softener in your home? And that will help tremendously, having a water softener in your home for the hard water, and then it's probably a little bit easier to control your PH after that.
Otherwise, there's natural ways of getting this done, right. You can add different, you know, botanicals. Like we had Scott feldman on talking about different things. You can put leaves, logs, stuff like that. Helps add tenants to the water and also inherently, naturally does do some softening to the water. Also, instead of using a sand or gravel base like we continue arguing about, use something more botanicalistic, such as like the volcanic ash clay that naturally lowers PH. That's why it's used for shrimp. It's really nice. I have 910 gallon takes in a recirculating system. One of those tanks has the clay bottom, the cray excuse me, ash clay in the bottom. And it lowered all the PH in the entire circulating together. So find natural botanicals to help stabilize. I think that's a better method than anything. Otherwise, just do your best to do slow acclimation from PH, get them to your tap and keep it there.
Haven't you got anything on top of that? No.
You guys kind of covered everything.
I had one that I was down in West Virginia, not too far from davi recently, and I stopped into a little place called stuckey's guppies. And the guy said to use clay. You said clay? Volcanic ash clay. Well, he was talking about using potter's clay. And what you do is you roll little balls about pea size, about a handful of them or whatever to start with, and then put them in the sun, let them dry out. Because clay is naturally acidic and it leaches into the water, brings down that's something that I just bought, a $25 big block of Clay. Because that's all I could buy at, like, a joanne or, like, one of my local stores. And so now I've got this giant block of potter's clay, and I slicing bits off of it and roll little balls. And just that's a great idea.
And it probably looks cooler than hell having little decor that's not going to really crap out the tank either. You don't have to do balls.
Well, you're not firing them when you fire clay, that's when they stay hard. But when you just roll them and dry them out, they actually dissolve into not only dissolve, but they break down into your substrate.
How kids want to get into fish? Why don't have a more natural aquarium for your kids and just have them take potter's clay and make little figurines for your aquarium. It's natural for the aquarium, lowers the PH, and the kids get to have fun.
Unless you fire it.
Yeah, you can just watch the little snowmen melt.
There you go. frosty going right down the titty.
Frosty the clay, man. anyways, good question. Scrap. Thank you for sending that in. Next message we got. And you get to curate some of these. So I got an absolutely massive long list from a gentleman named James from daytona, Florida. James is what we call a superfan. And according to absolutely love the podcast. Wish you had more episodes to listen to. I dust each episode off wanting more. Kudos to you. Since my attention span is that of.
A goldfish, one of the poops, like a goldfish.
Right? So there's a ton of questions here, and it really came down to. There are so many questions to go over, I probably just have to pick a couple. But this particular gentleman, James in daytona, Florida, is investing in a fish store. He's not scared of COVID He's a real man. So he decided to take a good lump sum of money and start investing in equipment. Mars units, frag tables, overflow tables for plants. And he's planning on opening himself a fish store in the area since his area cleared out due to COVID. So kudos to you, James. We wish you nothing but the best. I will continue helping you try to set up that store of yours. I know you have plenty of other questions, but some of his questions were like, what to put in sumps. So I'm going to use those as topics for future podcasts. But if you're looking to do a store, it essentially came down to what was your number one piece of advice for opening a store?
Don't as he did this.
Exactly what I was going to say.
As he did this, the podcast just released of Adam talking about owning a store. So he instantly listened to that and then came back. But just to reclarify, to answer his question, give me if you're going to give him one piece of advice, what would that be?
One piece of advice?
One piece.
Let me think. You want to make your store the place that people will drive for 100 miles. You want to specialize in something that nobody else in the area does well. You know what I mean? Like, we talk about our friends down to Forest Lake, and they've got stuff there that you don't see anywhere else. You know what I mean? Right?
I mean, that's the destination store is what you want.
Destination store. I mean, Forest Lake Adams, probably. How many hours away are you from Forest Lake? We're 4 hours.
Well, before I was like five, but now I'm like 2 hours away.
Right.
And we all still go down to Forest Lake because they've always got something really cool. They're the only place you're going to go over and see that many different kinds of rays, different sizes of rays. They're really into the fancy bedas now. They've got a lot of koi angel fish, a lot of orange angel fish that you don't see very often, a lot of stores and stuff. And there's something new every time I go there, and they do it very well.
Shout out to Chris and the boys down at Forest Lake Pets. So, Adam, what is your one piece of advice for this gentleman that is investing so much into a pet store?
Focus on quality and build up your reputation. Because if you focus on quality and build up your reputation, your reputation takes years and years to build, but then it can, like, crap out in 30 seconds. So try to bring in the quality stuff. Become a destination store. And then definitely have a set policy list. There's always shades of gray with your policies, but definitely have a steadfast reputation for quality and that type of stuff. That's where you're going to be good. There's breeders, reptile people that I know that aren't really well known, but, you know, and fish people, too, and bird people, too, that I know that you know what you're going to get. And they'll stick by your word. And then there's these flashing pan guys that come in. They bring in something cool once or twice, they sell it for big bucks, it dies. And then they just too bad, deal with it. And so people don't go to them and then they go, well, why did my store close six months later? It's stuff like that you got to focus on. You go into it for the animals, but it actually has more to do with people than animals. If I were to say anything, one.
Of my biggest peas when I walk into any of these local shops and there's only a couple I'll go to because the rodents and ferrets. I love ferrets. My niece has ferrets. But they make my allergies just go crazy. And when I go into a shop and it smells dirty and it makes my allergies go all crazy, I hate it. I don't want to go back if it's dirty. It's a no go for me. But I found one spot, luckily, a few blocks from me that's really good. And keeping fish no allergies, blah, blah. You're going to have those kind of customers that are trying to keep some kind of pet that's not going to agitate them. And also, on the whole note of reputation, being a musician and doing my fair share of dive bars, it only takes, like you said, that one place at one time to have that thing that happens where it gets around. And no matter how many times a dive bar changes hands, it always has that reputation. And most people don't know when people are trying to make some place better because you're always going to have that clientele. But I know it's not necessarily a clientele on your pet shop, but I guess the same principle applies.
I'm going to keep this anonymous, but by us, we have a local pet store. I don't put names when I shit on people, but when you walk in, all you smell is this overwhelming scent of piss and shit. And you go in the back into the aquarium area and you get like mold smells from the water and just mismanagement and details. It's the worst thing. You want a person to go in, be overwhelmed with how cool this is not, oh, yeah, that's right. That's why I don't have a pet. And then they walk out.
Exactly. The other one thing too, I would suggest me being the old guy on the podcast, I'm slowly listening to Adam and Robbie about doing everything you can on the computer to let your customers know. And our friends over in Wells fargo have a nice little thing on Facebook, and they let people know when they have new shrimp in. And they'll go from having a $1,000 Saturday afternoon to having a $3,000 Saturday afternoon just by sending it out on Facebook. So by using these tools that are basically free, you'll have your base of your 50 customers that spend a lot of money in your store and give them first shot, give them an email or give them a shout out via the internet that you've got something in New and give them first crack at it. And then a couple of hours later, then release it to the public. Have two different lists, but take care of those people that take care of you and go on and make some money.
So Jimmy gave us the recommendation of making a destination sword. Adam said, make sure you have a quality up scrap. Said, don't let it smell like peace and shit. I'm going to go. I said before that, know the amount of time it takes. You're going to have 90 plus hours, individual weeks. It's too late. You've invested in it. You're going to do it. So I'm going to change mine to instead. Keep it in your hands. Adam even talked a little bit about not owning the location and having rent to go up. Those are things that if you have control of the assets and you know your costs, if you succeed when you're renting, they're going to raise your rent. If you're not succeeding, they'll still raise your rent. It's eliminate the variables as much as you can, especially in a high shrink business like fish. And that's how you'll stay successful, especially in the early days. Yeah.
The only thing you can control basically is your labor and the weather. That's the only two things you can control, the weather and labor.
So last thing before we start talking about patio ponds is we have a question in Live From Pit Bulls and plateaus. Adam, what is your favorite brand of kabucha? You filthy hippy.
I already said it. It's synergy.
Synergy? I thought that you were just talking about some horrible business pitch.
No, it's synergy awful.
Is it spelled S-I-N like sin, I think.
S-Y-N. Yeah, it's good stuff.
Just like the marketing campaign, probably. anyhow, so shout out to James. We'll hopefully see your store soon in dayton, Florida. All right. Patio ponds. Jimmy, this is your plateau here, not my platform.
It was not in my soapbox. You said, come up with a goddamn.
Good idea, and that is a damn good idea.
And you didn't like licking toads, so now we're going to talk about patio ponds.
I hate you. You actually did mention it because you know the amount of fans that I'm going to have, they're seeing me saying, we want a toad licking episode.
They will get a toad looking episode if Adam and I have to do it ourselves and leave you out of it.
I'm telling you right now that the only way we'll do a toad looking episode is if we have overwhelming response from people. Otherwise, it ain't happening.
And you know what? I'm going to go out and buy some toads, and we're going to sit here and just get Joe wiggled.
I'm going to feel like it's like a Joe rogan podcast. Like, dude, have you tried dmt? dude, lick his toe. Just lift the toad, man.
Lick a toad.
Look at toad.
Just do it. What I've been fascinated by other than licking toads. God, you are sucked tonight. Look the other way. Don't look at me anymore. Just make me laugh.
You want to suckle on my big toad?
No, that's probably worse than a toad. God.
I said toad.
Yeah, I'll get you, toad.
I'm looking away. Patio ponds. You can do it.
Patio ponds. I think that patio ponds are something that I've been reading about for the number of years. It never did until last summer, and I thought it was cool as heck. And I think that people really should try these things because you can do them for next to nothing. They don't have to be fancy. They don't have to be cute, but you can have great success. And we all know that the longer you leave these fish out in the ponds when you bring them back in the fall, if you live in a climate like ours, the more beautiful these things are. One of my friends that introduced me into patio ponds was my friend Kim Stokes, who's over in West fargo, North Dakota. And he has a small pond, and he filled it with red sword tails. And I'm just, like, really? You keep swordtails outside? He goes, I kept them outside till the 1 October. He said they did great, and he brought them in. They were three times the size of the babies that he had that he kept in. He was doing a science fair experiment. He had thrown out, like 30 small ones out into the pond and 30 into a 55 gallon tank to see which one he could grow faster. He was feeding some high end fish food at 40% protein inside, and then the fish outside goes, I ignored I'd throw some flake once in a while if I went by there, he said, but I basically ignored them. And the pond got scummy and it got dark, and then it would rain and overflow a little bit. And then come fall, he's looking in this pond, which he's kind of forgot about, and he said it was the most beautiful swordtail that he's ever grown up, and they were three times the size of the ones that he had in the house. And I laughed at him, but then I stopped by his house, and he was right. I've never seen such deep red velvet swordtails in all my life. It was gorgeous. And that's when I got the bug.
So for those that are listening, let's define a patio pond. There's two different styles here so we can clear up confusion. A pond that is built into your patio underground is a pond that's in a patio. A patio pond is something that's traditionally done. It doesn't necessarily have to be, but is done above ground. It's in some sort of large vessel. Generally, you can use I've seen people do 55 gallon drums, I've seen people do cheap water troughs. But generally the patio ponds, because they're already so cheap to do, are done in decorative vessels. Whether it's big decorative pots made, built wood frames with a liner, they're very easily done and decorative. And because of the nature of the pond itself, even if you're in a climate like Minnesota, most of the fish that we use in a lot of these trades for patio ponds can be used outside because the heat, even the night, a patio pond, due to the insulation from the pot itself, keeps enough heat overnight. You don't have to worry about it. So guppies, mollies, sword, tails, platties are all commonly used just because they can handle a bit of that dipping temperature in the night time.
Yeah, it's a slow dip, it's a slow rise in heat during the day, during the night. And most of these things, vessels, are kept near your house. And if you've ever been out, like we've had a very hot week, if you go out at 11:00 at night, you can feel the heat from the sidewalk, you can feel the heat from the side of your house just kind of bursting out. You could just feel it. And when you have these different containers on your patio near your house, that heat just kind of keeps these things warm till 304:00 in the morning. And then by then, the sun comes up at 06:00, a.m. Starts warming it up again. And so it's very easy to keep these things out there and it's very cheap. I was just at Home depot today, I saw a container, I would guess a plastic container, heavy duty, that you would use, like for putting in the back of your pickup truck that you throw tools in with a lid. And they were like $12 on sale. And I would guess that they hold 75 to 100 gallons. And I'm thinking, jeez, I should bring that home and put it on my deck.
So for those who are listening, we want to explain essentially how to build these, which is very up to interpretation, but also the climates these are in, these are not limited. So if you're in the 48 states, you can have a patio pond. It's just how long do you want to keep it out and do you want to heat it over the winter? And we'll have some. Installation. So when we talk about this, there is a climate zone map, I think it's iecc climate zone map and everything is rated by numbers. So we're in the area that's seven. Basically, God's forgotten us and we're the blistery horrible 40 50 below fahrenheit weather in Minnesota. And we're about the extreme as you get. So if we can do it, anybody in the 48 can do it. Even I know some people in Alaska that do it. The nights do not get down to where it's really risky in the summertime. In the spring and fall, you have to watch your weather. You're going to have a frost, you might have to put a heater in it. But once winter is done, these are already essentially potted units. So you can put rollers on them, put them in your garage or I've seen people just convert them to indoor patio pond.
Yeah, bring them in your sunroom. I saw a really cool video last night on YouTube that somebody had a and this was a she called it a patio pond, but it was just right off the edge of her deck and she had dug a pond and I'm guessing looking at it, it was probably about a 200 gallon pond. And she had a sheet of plastic over it with a heater and it was 21 below. And she went out with a jar and a net and collected guppies and they were big and beautiful. And I think she said the water was 55 degrees out there and they were just fine because they had acclimated that. But because of that, one particular one was in the ground. That ground really insulates very, very well and just a small sheet of plastic over the top of it was keeping it warm enough for these gut pieces to survive and it was 21 below.
Let's go over what it takes to build a patio pond as simple as possible. When I do this, it's a single pump generally plumped up to some piece of decoration, whether it's a pot or a piece of bamboo that you want to make it look like a fake spigot. Just something that makes a minimalistic pouring water feature because that's the way, again, you're going to get oxygen in the water is the movement of it hitting the surface of the actual container. Let's pick on something like 55 gallon drum or a big clay pot that's lined, having a single pump in the bottom. That is something big enough where it can take little pieces of debris and flow through, but yet small enough where it's not going to make a giant shooting fountain. Water feature is what you're looking for.
A real small power head works well.
Just a small power head in the bottom, making sure it has at least a cover so it's not going to suck up fish in there. Sponges on the tips work well just covering the pump head. You just got to make sure to clean out those sponges for a few days. Otherwise you can have no sponges at all and just have it flow. The beauty of these is because they're outside, you could just go out there every couple of days and change the water, water your plants with it, use it as a scoop, and just keep on changing the water continually. And that's what most patio ponds are, is filterless units. They have a lot of plants. They just have these water motion, the water feature pouring into the jar itself, into the container for the oxygen. So there's no air pump required in case it gets real hot, or direct sun for a period of time when the oxygen dips. And that's essentially it. Besides that, you can have any substrate in the bottom to begin plants and then just do floating plants. You can do duckweed and scoop it out every now and again and again. That splashing water will keep the duckweed honest so you won't have a real over control of duckweed. You can do pond lilies. Those are easy to do in structure. 55 gallon drum, water trough, clay pots, whatever you're looking for. Water, lettuce, water highest and anything you want. I've been putting spider plants in the top of my tanks in the summertime, putting out those decorative plants. It's fantastic.
If you really want to get crazy, you can just take go to your local flower store, get yourself some clay pots and just take you can put your nacrus in a clay pot or your hornworth, and that stuff will grow straight up to the top of the tank or the top of the pond. And then you'll have some places for the babies to hide. If you're doing cuppies plateaus or sword tails, which will then give them a place to hide and will look even.
Prettier, even some of the bulbs that don't necessarily have to have a lot of substrate. You can take the bulbs or seeds or a growing plant as is like water lily and put the bulb into a bag like a cheesecloth. Or I use gutter lining. You can get it at your Home depot, menards, wherever you're at. It's really cheap. You get a 100 foot roll for like 20, $30. You cut a little bit of it and essentially you just make a bag out of it. You put a rubber band around it, put some rocks in there, maybe a little bit of dirt, and it's like a little bag around the bulbs. You just drop and it sinks to the bottom of the pot. Makes it easy peasy.
And that's the beauty of these things, is that they're not a lot of work. The amount of satisfaction you're going to get from it when you go out there and you find yourself you've got 50, 60 little baby fish, and then watching them go from zero to adulthood in two months is incredible. But the problem is with these patio ponds is pretty soon you have one for for the adults, one for the babies, and then you've got three, four. All of a sudden you got seven of them on your deck and people are going, what the hell are you doing out there?
And I just think they brewing moonshine and they have them walk away.
That's right. I mean, last time, again, watching on YouTube, some guy had about 40 items out there alongside of his house and he had everything from five gallon buckets, ice cream pails, big containers like you. I see them where people will buy them like a target. And it's probably about two foot in diameter and two foot high, and it's got real panels on it. I don't know what it's like for putting toys in or whatnot. And he had those out there and he had red patties in one, he had blue platties in another. He had sore fields. He had all kinds of things out there. And he said at the end of the summer he would take all these babies out. And he said you'd think he'd have a couple of hundred babies. He had like 900 babies that he took to his local pet store. And he says just by having these few little things outside, it paid for his hobby for the entire year, which I thought was pretty cool.
All right, so we have the premise. We have essentially some sort of pot jar vessel container, and that's very liberal. But let's talk about the material itself. If you're using a 55 gallon drum, anything plastic, just make sure it's thoroughly clean. Some of those contained oil or something in the past. I don't know how you're going to get it clean enough to have a tank, but there's a lot of people out there that will go in there with a toothbrush and clean them out. But just make sure you're getting all the residue out of a recyclable container. Otherwise anything that's pet plastic will be just fine to use. In fact, it'll take a lot more flexibility and maybe you can leave it out empty in the winter without a whole lot of foster worry. Cattle troughs are great. Any cattle troughs that you're going to buy at Generation Fleet Supply, plastic ones, great metal. They don't really use metal like galvanized toxin metal for cattle troughs because cows have to drink out of them. But check your rating. Make sure it's not something that's going to rust and leave residue or some sort of like copper iron issues for your fish. Other than that, if it's a cattle trough intended for cattle and it has some sort of writing, you should be fine. Decorative pots. We just talked about how clay is a wonderful material, but make sure it's maybe a concrete, something that isn't filled with chemicals, that it has a bit of wear, that it's not going to fall apart after a couple of years. And frankly, if you're doing clay, it's probably not going to be some clay or stone ish probably not going to be watertight. You're probably going to want to put a liner in those. And most of these you can buy even have drop in plastic liners because they're intended to have plants in it. So you can take the liner out and either switch the plants quicker. Just use one of those that have a seal on the bottom.
I just installed one of those big vietnamese clay pots at my mom's house. We did a little research on them. And if you go to one of those big lots or ali's or someplace, a lot of times they'll have really cheap, sometimes they're broken. You got to look at them, turn them around. But they're somewhere around $50 or less if you want a nice big one. And we took some flex seal because flex seal, apparently there's some people on YouTube. You can look it up or using it to seal the inside of these pots because it's silicone based. You got to plug the little bottom hole in it if you don't want to do the liner. But, yeah, I set one of those up, $48 and then used a rail planter to start making my filtration. But I guess we'll get into that in a little bit.
Yeah, there's a ton of things you can do. Once again, our friends at Wells fargo last year wanted a bunch of guppy grass, and we've had trouble finding guppy grass. And we find that you get a hold of some and one of their customers took home 15 or 25 gallon white pails and put them alongside his house, put guppy grass in there, and each one to grow guppy grass because that's all you want to do is grow guppy grass. Well, of course, you've got all these pales full of guppy grass. All of a sudden he's got a huge mosquito problem out in his yard. Well, it makes sense because all this waters in these pails now are full of mosquito larvae. So he comes into the store and says, I got a mosquito larvae problem, and what should I do it so he bought some guppies and some platties, went out there, threw in three, four in each pail, and he said, I didn't care if they lived or die because I'm trying to go guppy grass. And much to his surprise, not only did he have a guppy grass explosion, but he also had a Platty guppy problem at the end of the year because he had so many and he had no filtration in there.
None.
None. So, like what he did with those pales, he drilled the top of the pail all the way around with a really small drill bit. So when the water came off the roof and filled these pails up so the pails wouldn't overflow, they would drain out through these holes. And the holes were so small that the baby fish didn't fall out. And the plants kind of acts as a filter for it, too. So every time it rained, he got a water change. And it was one of those summers where it rained every five or six days and stuff and he didn't lose any fish. And he came in and sold all this guppy grass. He had, I swear he had a half a garbage bag full of guppy grass and it's very expensive buckets and buckets and yeah, did a great job that way. But then found out that he was like keeping fish. And I know this year he's got about 40 or 50 pales out there that he was doing. And the first thing he did was the mistake that he did is he put the fish in first. He didn't let it sit and get full of mosquito larvae. So he did lose a few fish at the beginning because he said, I wasn't feeding them. But it doesn't take a long around here when the water is standing still, the mosquitoes get in there and lay eggs. And once the mosquito larva's out there, those fish got nothing but tons of protein to eat.
So pro tip, when you're selecting your vessel, find something with the bottom drain or something that you could add a bottom drain to, especially decorative if you have some way that you can just maybe attach some vessels. So you're going to be on your deck or patio. You can put it up, pull the cork, or turn on the little faucet, whatever you have, for a decoration that you can use as a bottom drain and pour it into a bucket, pour it directly on your plants. It works easy for quick water changes. You want to make it easy on yourself. You don't have to because again, you have a pump. You can just turn the pump wherever you have to spit it out and use that. But it's so easy to have some of those floor drains. So look what you have and see how you can incorporate either adding one or see if there was one existing. You also could have some seal issues, so it's pro and con. Do your homework on those plugs. If you see one that has just like a plastic ring plug, probably not watertight, but at least maybe that's something you could seal and add something to. But floor drains in those little ponds are great. Putting a base drain in a big pond, nightmare. They break, they crack. Even Gray, woodstock was on, told us that was not a thing to do. But these jars, much easier. Pots or containers, check that out.
I still like to back up the idea about you saying to go in and grab the water off your pond, off your patio pond to water your outdoor plants. I think that's a fantastic idea. I hadn't even thought of that.
There's so many different ways that you see if you can just type in patio pond on Google, you'll see an absolute array of different pictures of people doing patio ponds. And I got to say, my favorite is just that simple bamboo spicket. You can buy decorative bamboo from different craft stores. Be wary of that because it could have chemical on it. But if you get it from at least a natural place, you can turn those little pieces of bamboo into a fake faucet. Just put the tube from the pump through the bamboo, and it trickles out the top. Well, it's not just for looks to make a little water ripple sound. You use that because you could just quickly grab a container, and that's now a faucet you fill bucket with. It's super slick. It's useful and decorative.
Yeah. And again, if you get a real small power head that is rated for low flow, that is just the way to go. Some of these power heads, too. You can adjust the flow, too. So a power head is meant to be out underwater, and so as long as you've got it plugged into the right plug in and your patio, you shouldn't have any problems.
Heck, yeah. Let's talk about some fish species to put in the patio pond.
Piranha.
Big piranha.
Just so you could dunk your giblets in there and watch a good bit.
No. Adam and I had a conversation earlier on the day, and I said, have you ever tried a patio pond? And he goes, no. He said, I have to worry about the kids. Well, you know what one of the kids wrong with missing a finger? He'll tell the rest of the kids they'll keep their fingers out of the.
Damn pirate, or they name it colby because it's going to put his fingers in there.
No, he didn't name him colby because of that.
I'm so quiet.
Adam is just laughing. Adam, when we talked earlier, you're worried about the kids being in there? Well, yeah, because kids like, four rocks.
In there, and I was just worried about them messing with it and putting stuff in there that they shouldn't, like soap or whatever, because kids will be kids, and I've got four of them, so that was my biggest concern. And I kind of live kind of out in the country, so I was worried about Raccoons coming in there and messing with it.
Yeah, I mean, that is a distinct possibility. We just talked to dabney the other night, and he lost all his coy to a family. raccoon.
Damn.
He's very angry at Raccoons right now.
All right, so let's change off the beaten path. Instead of picking fish, we'll talk about protecting your patio pond.
Your patio pond.
So whatever fish you have, depending on the size of your patio pond, mostly, people can see the stuff on the top. They're not going to see very deep do it. They're going to see the fish come up, interact, they're going to be surface activity because they think they're going to get fed, they're going to get trained, you're going to feed them all the time, they're going to eat bugs, they're going to be at the surface. But the moment of predator comes, where are they going to go? On a patio pond. So you need to make yourself cover. And the best thing for raccoons is taking an old milk crate. Melt crates are plastic grade, they're safe, they don't bleed or leach into the water. And they have the perfect slots to let even large size fish go in and out of them. I have had great luck with using milk crates, but again, you have to have a pretty large patio pond to be able to incorporate a melt crate without having to take all your space.
I'm just going to do what Dadney did. I'm going to have dabney sit on my front porch with a shotgun and that'll take care of the raccoons.
No, HBO will take it away.
Too soon. But when Adam first says he's concerned about the kids, the first thing I thought in my head was safety. Because he's got one pretty young one. A small child can easily fall head for a student with five gallon pail of water and drown. Serious, isn't that true?
It is true, yeah. It's not funny.
It's not funny at all. And we don't want the that to happen. You have to know the age of your children and that sort of thing, what you can do to keep them in or keep them out of the pond and stuff. So that's the first thing came in my mind. I wasn't thinking that they're going to put don soap in there, but I guess your kids are pretty freaking reckless.
See, I'm teaching them to kill these Japanese beetles that are around my house and eating all my plants. They know to put them in the soapy water, and I'm just afraid that they would put the soapy water in the tub and then throw the Japanese beetles in it. But the drowning thing was the other one.
Yeah, I would be very concerned about that.
I feel like your situation particularly especially because you're teaching your kids to kill beetles, it's extremely unique.
Well, there's not a lot to do in small towns. If beetle killings all you got going on. That's all you got going on due to COVID.
And then they literally took away the only fare that comes once a year, the watermelon fest. The kids are bored, bored, bored.
Now, as a dad, are you paying these children to kill the Japanese beetles?
Yes, but then they get dad tax.
Let's explain to everybody what dad taxes.
You just take whatever you want back. That's how that works. It works more for Halloween. You take all the good candy that you want, like snickers and sweethearts and stuff.
Right.
What kind of authoritarian crap is this?
I'm teaching them about government.
Yeah. And they get to keep the mentos. You keep the mentos and you keep the popcorn ball. And I'm taking the sticker, pretty much.
What's wrong with the popcorn ball?
As razor blades.
What? Haven't you ever heard of this post apocalyptic utopian hell do you live in?
When I was growing up, when I was growing up, back in the day, they used to give away people would give you popcorn balls that were home made, that were fantastic. And then in the bigger cities, they started putting razor blades or pins or needles in these things and just being aholes. And so now you don't ever get a good popcorn ball. So if you get a popcorn ball, you probably can figure it's going to suck anyway. Let the kids have it.
Just don't accept anything that's not pre sealed. If the seal is broken, throw it out. That's it.
Pretty much. Are we even going to have Halloween this year because of corona?
I just heard today they're talking about because of the Coronavirus, that Black Friday was not going to be a thing this year because the stores don't want crowds in their store.
Cyber Monday is still better.
Oh, Cyber Monday will be dumb.
Yeah, because everybody wants to all these big corporate leaders have gotten together on skype or whatever they do whatever that thing is on the big internet. And they've all decided that they don't want to be responsible for having larger crowds of people, because people are sue happy and they're looking for somebody to blame if they get to COVID. And so they're talking about having just online sales, which will probably kill the Ups and fedex drivers, but we don't worry about them.
So going back to what species of fish you can put in these?
That's right. We're doing podcasts.
Yeah, we are.
Wow, that was a rabbit trail.
Holy cow. I like guppies. And I like the dumbo guppies. Because when you're observing the fish from above, like a butterfly koi with the wider fins and stuff, they're so beautiful from above. And of course, with the pond, your little patio pond, you're looking at all these fish from above. You're not looking from the side. And I think that's when you really can see some really cool looking fish is when you get into the dumbo guppies, which have the large petrol fins.
You're just secretly thinking that they're waving at you.
You know, that or flipping me off. One of the two. Well, how about this?
Because there's a lot of different solutions that we're going to come up with. So let's do it in three categories. We have cold water fish such as goldfish and koi. Fan tails are a great solution because patio ponds are smaller than using koi. Koi should not be in a patio pond that's rough size. Do your measurements know how big your vessel is? And that koi get 30 36, 40 inches. Right. They do grow and they grow fast. Not necessarily for these smaller patio ponds. So again, cold water fish, we have tropical fish such as your guppies, your molly's things, but these are a little bit harder than like a discus. discus is not going to survive through like a 65 degree night. It's just not going to happen.
Not well.
Not well at all because what was the ratio is the temperature, I think, gets six degrees colder than the air.
So if it's 65, it's like, what, 59 probably.
Right. Guppies, you know, they can serve up a night. Again, there's insulation in the vessel itself. They can make that through a night. In the worst of night, some species cannot. We have kind of like the mix between both worlds. They don't look like the cold water fish, but they're technically cold water. They look like the tropical. Like a white cloud is by far the number one best fish I can think of to put it in a patio pond.
White clouds come in a variety of colors and if the white clouds that we normally see are kind of red with a, some yellow, but I think for a patio, if you want some fish you can see go with the gold ones, the gold white clouds.
And they have the long fish ones too.
Yes, they do. And there you could really see a beautiful fish from above and they'll do very well. They can take extreme temperatures and that is a very popular fish that people use.
So the white clouds, why they're so good is because technically they're a cold water species. They can handle it the best, just like goldfish can. They stay at a small size and their fins, especially when they're outdoors, they like to flare a lot. And their fins actually all their fins have white tips so they interact with each other. They flare when they see you, they flare their white fins and they're very beautiful. Especially like you said, the gold species and long fin species look really nice and when they're an outdoor activity versus even your tank, they are way different behaving because I don't know if it's just stress or something else, but they are crazy fun as a topwater fish. So best species by far for a patio pond, white clouds. Now the tropical versus the cold water. Cold water, you're essentially limited to goldfish, whether it's some sort of comet dojo loaches work good if you want to have giant gold penises and they're legal in your state. Excuse me, you're looking at my dojo loaches. They're all cold weather species, they're fantastic. But know that most of these carp species like the koi and goldfish are not particularly fantastic at eradicating mosquito larvae in your patio pond. They will eat them, but they're not going to completely hunt them. Their dopey carp looking to dredge up the bottom.
Dopey carp.
I'm going to get.
Greg, you're forgetting the gambusha.
Yeah.
What about Gambucha? What about it?
Gambusha.
Gambuja. It's another drink that Adam drinks in the morning. Gambusha. That's right. He tea bags is how he does it.
The cool thing about gambusia is they can get down to 33 degrees and survive. They're North American fish. They're live bearer. They're also called mosquito fish because you were just talking about one that is not very voracious when it comes to eating them. So that's the other option. They're not very pretty, although you can get golden ones.
Not very pretty. Even the golden ones are muted on top. So they're trying to stay away from predators is the idea.
But otherwise they're better at eating your mosquito problem though, if you don't care about your fish, you want something that's going to eat your mosquitoes, that's the.
One you never have to worry about.
My friends at ozark Goldfish sell gambuza by the thousand and they are a very good price. And let's say you are living out in the country and you have yourself a pond and you've got more mosquitoes than you can throw a stick at. Some people will go out and buy 1000 Gamboosia and throw it in the pond with no intention of getting them back out, but it will take care of your mosquito problem and you will have so many fish in that pond all summer long that there won't be mosquito within a 20 miles radius of your house.
So there's a couple of other species, especially native, the American flag fish, I like that.
Killy fish, I like that.
Even some of the decorative bait, minnows like shiners, they suck. They don't look near as nice from the top, but when they move, they flash and make reflections because again, they're.
Just like a piece of tinfoil got rainbow shiners. They're a little harder to get, but they're a little more pretty.
What about some of the dwarf like pumpkin seeds and stuff? Dwarf blue gills, aren't they down in Florida when they make it?
Well, especially the pygmy sunfish, but they're so dark is the problem and seeing it from the top. So know that if you're having a patio pond, they need to look good from above. Unless you don't care about fish, pick something that is colorful to those new species. Like you said that's the sunfish all have that stripe to try to make themselves camouflage in the water so they're harder to see.
Another thing that I've done in the past, I did two years ago I threw about 50 female beta in 110 gallon pond that I had full of mosquito larvae. And those things all came out about two months later. Every one of them had the overpositor hanging out looking for a male. They looked like they all swallowed a marble. The colors were just as bright as any male out there. And I sold those things for premium. And the next year I thought. I'm going to throw a male and a couple of females in there and see what happens. And we got one cold snap and I forgot there and so they didn't make so they don't do well in the cold. But I threw them out there like mid June and took them out again like in mid August for like two months, but they grew exponentially.
Here's a fun thing before we go on to more species list, jimmy has a great idea, and I think this works really well, is using rainwater from your roof. Now some people have different chemicals in the roof, but generally if your roof isn't just brand new, those chemicals have washed off with rain and everything else, I wouldn't worry about that too much. But using rainwater just going off of your gutter system and having it pour into a bigger vessel works wonders. Top off the tank. If you have little rain, give it a try. Certainly something to look into. But you have one that was just intended to collect rain there for fish. It was just a utility vessel to collect rainwater. It's like a small cattle trough, ten gallon and you're like, I'm going to.
Put a beta in there and that was fantastic. There again, no, and with the bet I wasn't worried about because you didn't.
Feed it, you didn't look at it, you ignored it and by the end of the summer you had like, what is it? Dead veil, tall beta into the summer. It was fat, happy, beautiful, fins were huge.
Oh yeah, they were fantastic. And the nice thing about those two is that they don't need any irrigation and so they're used to living, I don't want to say stagnant water, but they also can take some heat. And of course this black rubber made 110 gallon horse trough gets pretty hot with the water when the sun hits it.
It wasn't direct sun, but it definitely got sun.
I definitely got sun. Yeah, it worked out fine. And this year I didn't even set it up because we put the pond outside in front of and paying all my attention up there, right, so certainly.
Think about that as well. But no betas are a great option. And then any of those like paradise fish, even some garamis that can take more abuse as far as heat goes and know your area, even if you're in Minnesota, as long as the nights get 65 ish even down to 60, most of these species are just fine. So watch your climate. And as far as other fish, I throw common platos in almost all of these things. They grow three times faster but they take a beating. I've had commonplaco actually all the way until cold fall and I take them out with koi.
Yes, and then they're pretty lethargic by then, but you put them back into your aquarium and they slowly warm up and they do just fine. So as long as everything is gradual and temperature swings, which for the most part outside, always is, unless you get some freak storm that brings in some really cold rain and chills everything up, you shouldn't have any problem. What about shrimp? That's what I want to try. I have not tried it. Have you guys tried it?
I'm learning because I've never done this before, so that's why I'm not saying much. I literally have never done this before. Could you put shrimp out there?
The only thing I've done is a mono shrimp. And a mono shrimp, by their nature, default, take a lot more abuse than, like, dwarf, colorful shrimp. It'd be something to try, but a lot of those shrimp are so expensive. Unless you go to Joe Shrimp shack.com and use our promo code 15% off for aquarium guys to check out, it's really expensive.
Sounds good.
Really expensive to put those shrimp in those containers. So, I mean, if you want to try it, send us a message.
But look at it this way. So if you've got a small container, let's throw ten blue velvet shrimp out there and see what happened, because they're going to go, voracious. After all this stuff that's growing on the side of that little container, and it's just ten shrimp. I mean, you're not throwing out 150 shrimp out there at a dollar apiece or whatever you're paying for. I mean, I would just try some red cherry shrimp maybe the first time and see how it goes from there. So I think it would be a great thing to try. And you know what? I'm going to try it for the summer is over, and I'll give you a report in September.
Wonderful.
That's good to know.
We've talked about the vessel, we've talked about the fish. We haven't talked much about locations where you're going to put these patio, pond put on your deck, put on your patio. The reason those work so well, you're looking for something that's called half sun, meaning maybe it's all sun in the morning, afternoon, and takes a rest. You don't want hard shade all the time because then you have a temperature issue. You're not getting enough heat to sustain the fish. You're not getting a light for a lot of these hard, light soaking plants. Lilies want it all day. Half the day is about their limit. You will have some wilting problems. And when those types of plants wilt, they shit out and leave pieces all over the pond.
And the other thing, too, about having them on your patio is that you're going to be out there every day in the summer. I mean, we have dogs, so we're constantly letting the dogs outside. You are constantly out on the deck doing something. We have plants out there that are watering, and so it just becomes another item that you're kind of keeping an eye on every day. And so you'll notice very quickly that when these fish start getting too cold, and they become motionless and stuff, that will probably signal for you to bring them inside and warm them up. I'll tell you a quick little story about my first year that I lived over here. Rob and I are neighbors, and I live basically just kind of like a block over. And I put an aquarium outside thinking that would be good enough for a patio pond. It was just an old crappy aquarium that I had. I put it out there, and I made the mistake. I used a regular air pump and an airstone and a sponge filter, and I put my air pump underneath a clay pot, and I plugged the hole of the clay pot so it wouldn't get wet, because my concern was when it rained on an actual air pump, that was going to short out. And what happened is because I had a clay pot on top of the.
I'm sorry, you're trying to keep a straight face. People are messaging us on discord right now, and they're making fun of you.
Making fun of me again. And anyway, my pump burnt out because it got too dang hot. So that was a mistake I made. It cost me a $12 pump or whatever. But another way that I'm doing this next time is I have a big pump downstairs. I'm just going to run an airline through the wall and put the airline through the wall and leave it there permanently and then just turn it off come winter from the inside.
Easy peasy locations we mentioned before, thinking about using water gutters. But mine, it's got to be easy. Most of these ponds that you have aren't going to have filters, and you're not going to want to deal with it. You're going to want to use the water changing methods. You're going to have to leave the bacteria in there and continually change water. You walk by, you put the garden hose in the bottom and just turn it on, but it run over. Either that or use that spout at the bottom. Or if you're really smart, you just get that little bamboo faucet you made. You turn it to the right, and it pours directly into your flowers.
And if you're in an apartment building, it goes down onto your neighbor's deck.
Even better.
Yeah.
I literally had a guy that was in an apartment building. He had fish tanks, and it's like, oh, dude, let's do a water change. And he grabs his hose and just sticks it out his window, and he just dumps all over this guy's air conditioner. I mean, the air conditioner takes rain, but can you imagine being that guy just sitting there eating dinner, and suddenly just water explodes in your air conditioner window. I talked about it.
It's a rental.
We don't care.
But keep yourself keep it by a garden house. You're saying?
I heard of the story of a guy putting a 100 gallon fish tank outside on his balcony, and then he filled it up, and as he finished topping it off, the supports for the balcony gave way, and it took out every balcony for, like, five.
Oh, my God. I hope nobody was downstairs.
Barbecuing requirements. Do some homework on that. Don't take out your neighbor's patio.
Oh, my God. Was it 100 gallon tank?
You said like 100 gallon tank. It's just massive tank. And they're like, yeah. So my buddy was filling it on.
His patio, and I'm like, Why? Well, it wouldn't fit in his apartment. And I'm like, but why was he outside with it? And he literally goes, yeah, filled it to the top and crashed down everything, took out everything below it.
And for those that don't understand how heavy water is, it's just over £8 a gallon. So what was that? 100 gallons? That's got to be £800 or something like that.
Plus, you're standing there and you're £200.
Yeah.
So you're looking at £1000.
And plus, if the guy is out there standing there, and he's got his barbecue grill next to his ten speed bicycle, next to his curtain with the dogs playing poker, it's a lot of weight out there.
Yeah. The guy's char grills got nothing. It's done. Your barbecue is over.
4.
July is over.
I love it.
I would love to have seen the insurance for that one.
Stupid is what stupid does.
Use common sense when putting your bond out there.
Yeah.
Just know where you're putting stuff, know what's underneath of it. If your deck needs a couple of supports or whatever replaced or whatever, it's been there for a while, and it got a little give in it. Just know what you're yes.
If you jump on your deck and the whole house shakes, you might want to reconsider putting a pond out there.
Now, again, if you're doing these patio ponds and you don't want to do plants, think again. You're not going to have near the results. You're not going to have near the luck, really, without plants, because, again, there's not a whole lot of filtration. Even you can put filtration. It's not great in a patio pond environment. And you need cover for your fish, and you need something to combat algae. It's outside. And if you're doing it right, it's half sun, you're going to have algae. If you start right with those top water plants, you are slowing green water to ever happen. You're giving your fish a place to hide. There's so many reasons, even if you have just duckweed, just something simple guppy grass in your environment. But the top water plants are the best. And we've mentioned a couple of plants, but my favorite that I've seen people do is irises. Irises are a semi aquatic species. No one really understands this.
I love that song.
Grandma has these perennials by Google.
I know. Let's play that right here. No, sorry.
Please edit him out.
No, we want to go carry out no, it's going to be stuck in my head now. How dare you? anyways, grandma has these irises. They're perennials, but they're semi aquatic. You can literally throw irises where there are cat tails. So if you take your iris and literally put it on a little shelf, so you already had that melt crate in the bottom of your patio pond. You can literally just prop up and set and maybe beg the roots on the bottom, as we explained before we did, with lily pads and lotuses do the same with that. As long as around 50% 40% is exposed on top, they will explode and look beautiful and bloom in your patio pond. So give that a go. What other plants do you recommend, Jimmy?
Anything that grows quickly, like the inaccuracy. I still think for the money, it's cheap, it's easy, but I still love the bulb plants, the apon bulb plants, they do well outside. I still want to try the plant. We always talked about the lace plant. I think it would do well outside if it had direct sunlight. But I could be wrong. But I just think any plant out there, duckweed, which is nice about duckweed, is when it gets to be too much, you take a handful and you throw it out in your yard, it dries up and it dies. You don't have to worry about it. But if you have a lot of goldfish, they love duckweed. They eat duckweed, feed it to them. The one thing that I read just recently that was pretty interesting is the one guy that was reading up on it does a lot of these patio plants. He made a small cover for each one of his patio ponds, and he had about twelve or 13 of them. I think he went to like a Walmart or hobby Lobby, and they sell the sheets of 30. I can't remember it was like 3 mm thick plastic. But the sheets are four foot on a roll, and so you can go there and get any length that you want. And it's like about a buck of foot. I know our local Walmart sells it. And he made a wooden frame and put this piece of plastic on it and made each one fit on top of the container that he had. He had all these different size containers. He did it all for about 15, $20. And he said that he got an extra 30 days outside because at night he would go out and cover them up and it would retain the heat, and so the heat didn't evaporate. And it also kept predator out, too. And he said some mornings it would be cold out and he would go to work and he would kind of check on them, and he would just leave that plastic on top. And it just became a magnifying glass, and the water was all heated up and nice when he got home in the afternoon. There was another tip that I saw on the internet, the interwebs, the dark web. Was that the dark web?
That's not the dark web.
Kim, I don't know how dark web is. You guys will have to explain it.
That's where you get arijuana illegally.
Arijuana?
Yeah.
Really?
You can only get behind the glass.
Oh, that's right.
Wait.
You can get him not by going on the dark web. If you know the right people, if.
You know Adam and say please, he.
Looks like a terrorist. Does he?
And now the feds are at his apartment, like right now.
Who is it?
The feds. We're here for Carol. I heard that.
I'm watching it on the one years ago, I'm watching Adam on the webcam, and his little guy keeps poking his head in the door. And I said, he's the feds.
Dad, you done yet? The feds are here?
Yeah, mom says get done. We're having dinner now.
I just need to know. Canadians, they all have the cool air on us.
A, I got a couple of other plants for you.
Do it.
So there's money wart, which comes in a couple of different varieties. There's a gold and there's a green, also called creeping jenny. You can find creeping jenny at places like home depot or whatever. But some of the other ones, that.
You can also find a person named Jenny that's creepy at those same places.
She's very creepy. I'm not a small, may not be a smart man, but I know what creeping jenny is.
But anyway, life is like a ball.
There's another one that's really pretty. It has a purple flower on it called a water hyacinth. Although with water hyacinths, you have to check your local area. Because if they don't carry it's, probably because it's a very invasive species, if it gets into waterways, it can proliferate very well.
For those that don't know about water hyacinth in Minnesota, we don't have to worry about it because they die in the winter. But you ever watch those, like, national geographic shows where hippos come out of a big lush green lake? That's water hyacinth on top.
Aren't they toxic? Hippos? Hippos will kill you.
It has something to deter, but hippos don't give a damn.
No, the cool thing about the water hyacinths, though, is they have kind of like that lily pad effect. So if you're looking to give some extra shade to your fish or whatever, they have a nice big flat leaf. I heard that they're kind of difficult to get to blossom, but maybe no, not at all.
If you have them in direct sun, they'll blossom. If you have them in 50% sun, they will. But it'll take a little bit longer. It's not about if they will or not. It's just going to take a little bit more time.
Awesome.
I stand corrected.
Actual bamboo. I mean, we talked about the bamboo to make a faucet, like dead bamboo. But real bamboo works great as well.
Really? I did not know that.
Well, you put them in the back of like, hang on the back filters. Same thing for decorative pond lilies are another one.
And I heard elephant ear. But though elephant ear is one I think you have to transfer, I'm not sure exactly how you would do that one.
I have elephant ear this year out of my garden, and this is my first year ever. And I'll give you what I know about elephant ears thus far. Elephant ears come in a bulb that you plant, and up here in the northland, you have to take the bulb alt every year and then store it in peat moss.
We have to do that too, in Ohio.
And anyway, I planted five and three of mine came up. They are the most beautiful large leafy thing that I've ever planted. But it takes three and a half to four weeks for it to throw roots down before it even start growing. And so you have to wait till the ground is a certain temperature, then you put it in, then you wait for three to four weeks and it starts coming up. And I kind of forgot about them that I planted them there. I put little flags and I put mulch in. I had three inches of mulch on top and and it it pushed through the mulch very easily. And all of a sudden now they're shooting runners. They've only been up for about a week and a half and they're already 1012 inches high. And if you can put them in, in a a pond situation, I'm going to figure out how to do it.
I found an article, I'll post it in the live Chat.
That'D be cool because I think they're the coolest plants and I'm excited about being able to I'm one of these guys know that I'm really in the plants in my yard, but I just want to put in perennials because I'm tired of buying plants every year. And again today we bought a bunch of plants again over at Home Depot. And I just think it adds so much to a water garden. It's unbelievable.
Now, I don't know what you guys have at your Home Depot locally, but ours doesn't really carry a lot of aquatic plants necessarily. We have to go down to like, a greenhouse. So that might be a better option because you'll find a better variety even.
We sell like, bulbs and it's just only like for like 30 days in the early spring before you want to and then they disappear.
Yeah, I was going to say in our local menards, they sell like, water lilies, bulbs. And I've had pretty poor luck with them. I've tried them. People like cigarettes. Farms sell the hardy water lilies. A lot of the local Gordon water centers will have that stuff if you go to any of your pet stores, you probably can ask them to order in these certain things because a lot of people do carry them just as that it's very hard to display like water lilies in a pet store.
They have to have certain maybe like overflow tables. Maybe they already have something to hold. koi they can put on, but then it covers up their koi. It's just difficult.
It's just difficult. And you don't make a lot of money on water lilies and stuff, but you can pick them up for twelve, fifteen dollars a piece. And if you take them into your house, you can keep them until next year and they'll spread up again.
So now let's talk about winter care. So starting the fall, leaves fall in, you're going to get debris in your patio pond, your jar. Try to put them away from the trees. If you can't help it, so be it. It just added good tenants to the water. But you may clog a pump. Just keep watching for water flow. Even so in the winter, because the colder the water gets, the more oxygen it holds. So even if the water is really not moving or not moving fast, trust me, it's going to hold oxygen. It's in the peak of the summer where oxygen is really going to deplete from the water in such a way that you could have a 900 degree day direct sun, all the oxygen deplete and suddenly have fish gasping. So that's almost the peak time where you need to know that the water is moving and splashing on top of the surface. But having plants in there really fixes that. So again, in the fall, don't worry too much about debris. Try to keep them away from leaves. And then when it gets too cold and the definition of too cold for those that have the guppies and the tropical varieties we talked about, you want to watch that 65, 60 ish degrees or 63. I'd start considering bringing in if it's consistent. I mean, one night that's fine. But once it starts getting consistently cold, time to bring it in. And there are different options. You could drain your patio pond, because some of these don't move. They're outdoor only. Maybe they're made of cement. Maybe you made a fixture on your patio and you want to bring them in. Simply bring them in and you can recreate one in your garage. As long as it stays about freezing for cold water, or if it's a heated garage, you're also fine because again, you're simulating that close to 65 degrees in your garage as well. So bring them in, recreate the container. But I recommend that if you want to give this a try, make something that can move. Don't be afraid to put one of those planters wheels that you can get.
Yeah, little casters that they put underneath the plants. In front of my garage, I've got three big planters. They probably weigh about £40 with dirt and plants and stuff. And we've got wheels on them. So when I get done mowing, I like to take the blower out and blow all the debris out of the driveway and stuff, and I just slide them back and forth and it works really well. That's a great idea, too. I'm one of these people that I'm kind of anal when it comes to I like with planters. I have two of this color. I have two of this color, two of that color. But if you're doing a lot of patio, if you get so into this thing, which a lot of people have, when I look on the internet, something you might want to consider is finding the exact large container that you like and buying ten of them. And make sure that they're stackable so when it comes to the fall, you can take all ten of them down, maybe keep two in your sunroom, and stack them up in your garage. They only take up 2 sqft. Put them up in the rack and next year you're ready to go. Already again, I like that idea that you can tear these things down. They don't take up a lot of room in your garage. And next spring, easy peasy, you pick them out, you plop them right where you had them before and start over again.
So one of the methods that I saw someone do, they do this for a big pond and a patio pond is they went to an old dairy farmer and they found Ice old milk reservoir. It's a stainless steel food grade because it held milk and they just essentially popped the top off and it was just like the 50% container underneath. So it looked like a half a barrel almost on a frame. And on the front it's got a drain spot, so you can just unscrew it. So what they did is they just put their fish in there. They kept it in like a little milk reservoir. I don't even know what they're called. But you get them from dairy farms, older, close down dairy farms. You can find them on auction craigslist or just ask, hey, is there an old dairy farmer? And just go start talking to farmers. But these are great because again, they're stainless. algae will always just wipe off if you ever have an issue. And they last for absolute ever and have a drain out front. So when you bring them into your garage, they fit nicely in the corner. They have a stand. You just leave a garden hose attached to that front spicket, so you can just turn it on and it goes to your floor. Drain. Certainly look into those. That's an easy cheater way of doing it.
And the other thing I saw on the internet, which I thought was really cool, is there were people who were friends, neighbors like rob's and I maybe the three of us should do it. Each get the same ten fish and see who can get the most production out of the fish, the most size of the fish for a summer. And just do an experiment. Do a little competition with your fish friends and see who can knock it out of the park. And it gets to be a little bragging rights, a little rivalry going on. I think it'd be kind of fun.
We can do this with endlers.
Oh, my God. Oh, God. Yes. Please, endlers.
So no, because they're feeder guppies. Acknowledge it, and then we'll do it.
Just do it.
No.
For Christmas. I'm getting you Adam. Adam for Christmas. A T shirt that says endless are not fish.
That could actually go for our merchandise thing.
There's a picture that just popped up says, Jim, keep making them jokes.
Yeah.
And it shows, like, some Egyptian artwork. pyramid.
I think they're making fun of Adam because he's Egyptian.
Getting beat on because he's a brown man. Hilarious, guys.
So Adam is half Egyptian?
Half Egyptian. A quarter of Norwegian and a quarter Irish.
And we treat them all the same, do we not?
And yet you grew up in South America. That's kind of odd.
Yeah.
You've seen America's Most Wanted. There's some family episodes on there that he'll talk to you about later on off the show.
No, there's not.
So I'm looking on this one. I guess we kind of COVID all the topics. No one has any messages for us.
In Discord Jimmy, because nobody cares.
Everybody'S like, weird to have patio ponds. Leave us alone. All right, let's go to the stuff that we don't know about. Like licking frogs.
Exactly.
With water in patio pond. Maybe we should call Matt, see if he's done, like, a jar outside.
That would be cool because that would be an episode about saltwater fish.
I can imagine it'll spill out all the saltwater, goes over his plants and kills him.
Either that or blue ring octopus will grab Adam and drag him in and kill him. One of the two.
And that's why you let your kids kill beetles, because octopus don't really work out for you. Now.
You need a live rock. You need one of those live rocks with a bobbit worm in it.
Oh, we learned about that.
Go listen to story time volume one if you want to know more.
By the way, we're going to be planning on story time three here. Who's hyped.
I was like, I don't think I have any more stories, but I kind of like that story about the guy putting 100 gallon tank on his patio. That's kind of funny.
So those are listening. If you guys have a topic or guest that wants to be in the show or you want to be on the show. Yeah.
You got something better than this?
We're very picky. All right. It doesn't sound like we're picky from our content.
We are quite picky.
You want someone that's notable or an expert, something that as long as you have something to share that most people don't know about. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for something unique.
We're looking for a towed licking expert. That's what we want.
We have a lot of other people lined up, but we're always scheduling out as far as we possibly can with guests. So certainly message us. I'll put a form up on the aquariumgistpodcast.com. You can either email me, call me, message me if you want to know someone or you yourself want to be on the podcast or a sponsor for that matter, give us a ring. But Jimmy, you got anything?
I've got nothing. If we're not doing towed licking, that's it.
Telling you they're not going to message me, I hope. Adam, how about you?
I'm good, too. That was actually pretty good. Now I just got away from my kids to grow up a little bit and I'll throw a couple of these outside.
Done.
You're going to throw the kids outside or a couple of times?
Well, I should throw the kids outside.
Well, I'll have to do Adams on the I guess just so we have the same we should do that.
We should do that because dabney now has a few of Adams endlers done with.
Yeah, Dabney's got him. He's got a trio and he's been feeding angel fish babies.
I actually talked to him the other night and he's got endlers going pretty well. He said Adam is just hanging his.
Head on camera right now.
I was trying to explain to Danny that endlers aren't really fish, that they're just mosquito larvae.
All right, guys, we'll see you next week, monday, seven Central. Always join us. And I don't know, I always want to just pick on the tint. You guys got to check out that podcast. Stay thoughtful, stay courageous.
Always stay with, stay wet.
What's your catch phrase? Punch in the face?
My catchphrase? I'm not punching to throw it. I haven't thrown it out there lately. You guys have been pretty well behaved, right?
You just want to electroshock me like.
A punch is going to happen.
Don't forget the shocker for next week.
Yes, I have got one for a large dog which will go around his neck.
All right, I'm leaving, guys.
And I've got one with a small dog which you can put it right around his face.
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I never knew that a Minnesota accent.
Could be spotted so sexy until I heard adam's voice.
Go frank yourself. Don't you know that's my boy? Don't you know.