pikecoe Your respondants are bog purists. Your bog will not suck up water because what your are really talking about is a bog filter. A bog filter is the VERY BEST FILTER you can have. But the ONLY planting medium you can use is pea gravel and you plant your bog filter with all the regular rooting and floating pond plants. Just make sure you only plant into the pea gravel in the botto of your stock tank and don use any pots or containers. And don't use any fertilizer. Your fish will provided everything you need. Pump your pond water to your birdbath into the bog and back to the pond. Your bog/filter will work best if it is completley overgrown with whatever plants you decide to use. Cattails, bog lilies, yellow irises, Bog bean, watercress, papyrus, umbrella palm, pennywort. I know somebody will start hollering "you can't use that...it will take over...etc etc etc. That's what you want if you want it to look good an be effective. If there gets to be more of something than you want then you remove some and NO.....nothing is going to puncture you STOCK TANK.

There are a number of ways to make keeping your pond maintenance more efficient without the outrageous price your handyman puts on the job. The first problem of fine leaved Honey Locust leaves could be solved by making a screen sided or mesh sided basket to put into the top section of the pond to collect the leaves. Just leave it in place between cleanings. If you are handy, the screen sided bucket is simple enough but premade mesh fish nets come in some rather large sizes and shaping the handle to serve as a cup type handle is easy enough as is making some sort of shelf to hold the net in place. Just lift the net out by the handle, let the water drain back if it is sufficiently clear and dump the leaves out. I am putting in a link for a website that happens to show several products on the same page that would do a good job of cleaning the mulm under the bottom drain. The fish capture nets are there, too. The Muck Vac is about as simple as it gets. The price is a bit steep but it works. All you need is 50 lbs water pressure in the hose. The leaf vac uses a bag to catch debris and I use one to collect leaves on the bottom. It isn't as good for mulm unless you get the extra bags for that purpose. The price is hard to beat. It adds water to your pond so prepare as for a water change. The Python pond vac is a more elaborate version of the Muck vac designed to collect leaves and mulm. It is more difficult to get into tight places and I have a problem opening and closing the jar that collects the debris because my hands hurt a lot. The pond vacuum on this page is pretty expensive but you can get a garage(utility)vac with a continuous flow(water)discharge for between $75 and $90. It works, too. Just add a hose to run the water to the garden. I got one at Walmart and I've seen them at Lowes, Menards, etc. It took me a while to get the hang of it but Horton came through for me with proper instructions. UV, UV. Hum-mm. I don't see anywhere the flow rate would be low enough to let the UV work. I see you have valves all through the system that makes in-line space at a premium even if it lets you adjust the flow. It seems to me that adding another pipe with a valve to control that flow would make the system complicated to the point of maintenance inefficiency and it would certainly raise the scream level. Maybe I am wrong. Since you are going to move, I would use a small submersible pump and a stand alone UV + filter. It might even be possible to get by with only the sponge included prefilter to protect the pump. The object is to increase dwell time to allow the UV time to work. You can get small fountain pumps for cheap. Try Harbour Freight.I found the UV and filter from Laguna on sale for 45 bucks. several years ago. That screwdriver must be a sign of ingenuity or ineptitude. I don't know which. One of these days you will laugh at it. In a number of stores I see wire shelves that are stackable in the laundry and storage departments. I don't see how deep the hole is but I bet you could find one of those shelves that would fit close enough. You might need to do a bit of bending or cutting. Please do not put stones on the bottom of the pond. It will make cleaning an impossible task and eventually the water will become stinky. Now I will let the smart guys take over. I still like your pond. Sandy Here is a link that might be useful: Simple inexpensive ideas that work well

I plant my plants directly in the gravel. Yes, I have some Anacharis planted in some pea gravel in a dishpan on the ledge with the lilies. I had lilies sitting in the bottom of my old pond that was about 4 ft deep and they did really great. I may just put them in the bottom again. I wasn't too sure about the Anacharis, in my old pond that seemed to be where all the sting algae was coming from. When I took the pan it was planted in out and dumped it out to wash off the string algae there was LOTS of Osmocote that I had put in the gravel. I washed all that away and planted it in the gravel without Osmocote or anything else and put it back in the pond and so far so good. Glenda

Zone 4, Tucson AZ Sonoran Desert I had been planning on a very similar setup for my own situation, which is a concrete pool of about 25000 gallons. Up until yesterday (Dec. 24, 2010), that is, when I went to a local nursery to see water plants, as my eyes and brain had gotten weary of reading and trying to understand how things go together. The man at the nursery told me of bog gardens, and I'm pretty sure that is the way I'll go. He told me to google Nelsons Water Gardens (www.nelsonwatergardens.com ) and read about their bog filtering system. Look under "Nelson Know-how". THAT's what I want, that's what will work for me, and that's what I plan to do. Maybe that will answer a lot of your questions. I came here today to ask questions about construction materials, since I'm on a budget. Since a bog garden should be about 12'deep, according to Nelson, and the stock tanks are deeper, you will lose a lot of the visual beauty and reason for the bog. Consider eliminating both stock tanks, and replacing them with a bog type system. The stock tanks will hold and keep all the nutrients your bog plants need to thrive. Maybe use one tank as a water catchment and filter for rain water from your roof before allowing that water to go into your pond. Maybe use the other to filter your laundry gray water before sending it via a rock strewn plant filled stream, into your bog. If you do that, be sure to use biodegradable, fragrance free/dye free detergent, and no laundry softeners, liquids or sheets, of any kind. Did you know that those things damage your clothes? In fact, wash new clothes separately from those with which you have used those products for a few washes, so any remaining residue won't transfer to the new items. Ella5