I ditto tiller and others. Good advice from all so far. The only thing I would add about chemicals...is that there is one bottle of stuff you really should have, and that is a water treatment for Chlorine and Chlorimines. Chlorine is not that bad if you add less than 10-20% of your total amount at once. The fish can get Gill Burn if they play in the hose spray so put the hose in a area they can't get to. The chlorine will hurt your bacteria colonies in your bio filter but won't wipe em out. After a day or two contact with the air will dissipate the chlorine (it will go faster if you have an airator or waterfall). Chlorimines though are baaaad. They will never leave your pond without being treated with an additive. You can call your water company and see if they use chlorimines. If they do, then you need to get in the habit of using a neutralizer every water change. If they don't then you can get away without, unless you notice your plants being hurt by chlorine when you change the water. "Bad stuff" on the bottom are organic compounds like leaves, fish poop, dead fish etc. As it decomposes it will create a layer of mud called "muck". It's black and smells bad. If your pond ever has a sewer odor that's a sure sign that your muck has run amok and the fish are in danger. When this happens oxygen levels drop and you start getting brown algae and your water will look like rootbeer. Anaerobic bacteria start to go to work in the oxygen free environment. This is a fish death sentence. You should regularly scoop out the majority of the muck leaving as little as possible on the bottom after it settles back down. "Regularly" depends on your pond. More trees, dust, pollen, weaker filter etc mean you need to clean it up more or less than others. There is no rule about how often to clean. To clean out muck, you just need to scoop it out. You can do that by hand, with a bucket or shop vac. One thing I like is this little attachment that goes on the end of a garden hose. The flow of the hose water creates venturi suction that pushes the muck into a little nylon bag. Keep in mind that with any of these options you will stir up the muck and it will take a day or so to see improvement. If you do it regularly, the stirred up muck isn't a problem for the fish. But if you have a deep layer of it you might want to do what destany said above, and move the fish into a container for a bit (filled with pond water!) as all those bad compounds will be spiked during the clean. If your depth is closer to 3 feet I would still think about either getting rid of the goldfish (donate them to a pet store or other ponder) or the koi. With either 3 koi or 11 goldfish you have about the right fishload. But with both, you have about double what you will need in a year or so when they get big. If you are dead set on keeping all of them, you need to plan on losing some to stress or plan on getting a heavy duty biofilter and/or doing regular muck sweeping.

If you're planning to have someone dig the pond, lay the liner, and add a few tons of rocks, then the price you were quoted is probably an average cost. There are ways you can do it for less. When I put my pond in, the liner and equipment (skimmer, waterfall bio box, plumbing hoses, pvc glue, waterfall foam, and other assorted equipment, cost a grand total of $1,200.00. The catch? I dug the pond myself, got some friends and relataives to help me lay the liner in the hole, and did the plumbing work myself. It isn't hard. The rocks cost extra, but I ended up taking the rocks out anyway -- it looked great, but too much maintenance for my taste. I personally wouldn't use the aquascape system. I'm sure their equipment is probably good, but they dump a ton of rocks in there and their calculations are often way off the mark, leaving you with less water volume than promised. I also don't like the stair-step shelf rings that invite predators. If you want a liner pond and don't want to wield the shovel yourself, look into renting a mini excavator. They're fairly easy to operate, and you should have the job done in one day. The cost should not be much, compared to the price you were quoted for installing the pond. Or, if you know some teenage boys who would like to earn a few hundred bucks for some hard labor, ask them to dig it for you. I have a friend who hired her garden men to dig her pond, and they had it done in one afternoon. Some people are perfectly happy with their little preforms and stock tanks, though, so it's all in what you're looking for. For me, I like large koi, which cannot be placed in a small preform.

romanr,acquiring that 2000 GPH pump sounds like a good plan, especially since it is on sale! Though I can't tell you if it is a reliable pump or not as I have not come across that brand name? Laguna pond pumps, Pondmaster pond pumps and Little Giant pond pumps, are reliable pumps and you may find them on sale at this time of year. Do a search and it maybe worthwhile to you. The "rule of thumb" commonly advised, is to turn your pond water over once to twice per hour, so you will be well within those specs with a 2000 GPH pump, even with your piping lengths there will not be a great loss in the flow rate. The bonus about having a greater output from the pump than you really need, is that you have the volume already there, should you need it in the future. Once you get the pond bug, you will probably want to go bigger and better, like a great number of us did. You can install a ball valve on the output side of the pump (never on the input side!) to control the flow to what you want, it will not harm the pump in anyway. Good luck with the project, "Horton"

Yes we do have a very different view of the zones. Mainly for me, that is because I think the USDA zone map is "somewhat" useful in a limited way if I apply it to plants that I want to landscape my yard with. Its a "loose guide" for me, no more, when landscaping. Mainly because it only deals with COLD temps. You have to use a separate criteria for HEAT here in the South. There's no one map. I think that's a shortcoming. I know a separate heat index map does exist. But as far as the USDA zone map is concerned, I find it a lot more useful for my greenhouse. I am in zone 8B. However, I am still able to grow many plants in my yard that are supposedly only labeled for zone 9 and above. If I gardened by what books said about the zones certain plants would live in, and paid attention to the zone maps, I would be shortchanging myself on growing a lot of neato plants that actually do very well here. I do find the concept of "zone" imminently useful inside the greenhouse though. I have plants growing and blooming in a zone 11 environment that are supposedly "zone 10 and above" plants that friends of mine in South FL zone 10 have not been able to get to bloom in their yards. I have to wonder, if I turned down the heat, would they still do as well? Probably not. When I first moved to FL in the very early 1990's from Los Angeles, I was stunned at all that could be bloomed here, in the ground and even just in CONTAINERS in my zone 8B, that could not be bloomed in the zone 10-11 So Cal environment. Certain gingers, heliconias, vines, orchids, they will do so well here even if you have to stash them in a freeze, and they wouldn't do well in So Cal even in a "frost free" environment. I asked "Why?" many years later on a forum that was heavily weighted with West COast people, and the answer seems to be "heat accumulation". Even though So Cal where I lived was a zone 10-11 and rarely if ever actually freezes, its too cold at night most of the year, and too cool in the day most of the year, to afford the continuous heat needed by certain plants to thrive and bloom. So when I set up my greenhouse, I had to think, "How do I want to do this?" Because actually, In FL, its much harder to cool the greenhouse in summer than it is to heat it in winter. I decided that I wanted a "conservatory style" planted greenhouse instead of a greenhouse that had benches to set stuff on, and that if I was going to go to that type of setting, I wanted it to be a jungle with everything that I could never leave out all year here. So if I was going to commit to THAT, I decided, zone ELEVEN conditions were what I wanted. Anything that can take a zone 8B winter, even if it goes dormant and comes back as a "perennial", or gets leaf burn but survives, does not merit the zone 11 greenhouse. Only stuff that would never bloom or live in zone 8B, or is expensive of somewhat rare, gets to be in the zone 11 greenhouse. Maybe that's a simplistic attitude on my part. I don't pay a lot of attention to how much it costs to run the greenhouse. I only keep records for tax purposes, because I do run a small mail order plant business and have to report income and expenses. If I was a huge business entity I would probably think I needed to have a more formulaic approach to the greenhouse, but I'm just not. I admire people like you who have all that scientific stuff going for them. Its just not my focus. I'm more into just cranking up some Blue Eyed Christ, getting out the fertilizer and piddling around in my greenhouse. I don't like to think about it too much.