Scroll down to the bottom of this page - do you have something that says "browse gardening and landscaping stories on Houzz." Down at the bottom is one called "Natural Swimming Pools: More beauty, no chemicals." I read it - its actually quite good and the pictures very appealing - ways of keeping water clear and relatively clean without chemicals.

I hadn't noticed that, thank you. It looks like, in order to do that, I'd need to do some serious structural modification. I wonder if there's a way to do this without a major overhaul.

This may be a stupid thought, but pumice has a very large surface area, and it's buoyant. I wonder if any of the biological filter plants and microbes could be seeded on floating pumice micro-islands.

There are a few hundred tadpoles in there, growing rapidly. Some mortality but mostly they're doing fine, and very energetic. They're actually eating away the algae faster than it can regrow; the water is now transparent (albeit still green) and some parts of the plastic have been scraped completely bare.

I threw in a cup of mud collected from several places under the water line of an active real pond as an inoculation. I'm thinking if I can put 2-4 inches of sand in the bottom of the pool, that will provide a massively increased surface area for nitrogen cycling microbes to grow, but for now I haven't been able to get it.

One of my coworkers turns out to have a decorative pond and a drainage pond, I'm going to try to get some samples of free floating surface plants and oxygenators from him, but again, haven't been able to get it yet.

Praise God, still no mosquito larvae. The water boatmen and backswimmers are breeding, I think their predation may be responsible for some of the tadpole mortality, as well as the absence of mosquito larvae. I still hope to get some mosquito fish in there at some point.

I dare not add a pleco right now. The tadpoles are eating down the algae so fast, the poor fish might starve. After they move on to being land amphibians I do want to add at least one, though.

The surviving tadpoles have grown up and moved out of the pool, though they come back to visit now and then, and we can hear them singing at night.

Put some water lily, a small plecostomus, and a couple dozen minnows in the pool-pond today. Gonna try the lily free-floating, if that doesn't work I'll need to weigh the root end down. One minnow died quickly but the others seem comfortable, the pleco too.

Still don't have the sand I want in there, nor a good live growing oxygenator. Been thinking if I need a short-term, stopgap aeration solution, I could take the filter out of the filtration system and run it anyway. The output nozzle is a couple inchws above the surface, and the stream arcs upward, so it could create a lot id splashing and churn the surface like a small waterfall that way. Don't want to pay the electricity to run it a lot, though. I wonder how possible and expensive it would be to convert it to solar power.

I have a number of ponds (5) and none have filtration but 3 are linked with a solar pump running water from the bottom one back up top. And that's only to provide a humid microclimate around the top pond. The solar pump only runs for about 4 hours, less when it's cloudy. Solar pumps for ponds seem to be designed to only run when the collector panel gets full strength sun. Any light hazy cloud or a few leaves blocking the sun and there's not enough power for the pump. The other thing is they're not designed to pump water up high. Many pond specialists will tell you there's no saving by going solar over running a mains supplied electric pump. But you still have to buy a mains powered pump and you have to pay for the cabling needed for it. There's pros and cons to both types.

Sounds like I'd be better off trying to establish a no-pump balanced system than trying to make the pump run cheaper.

It depends on how you want it to look. Some people want crystal clear water sitting in a meticulously clean pond. That is usually only achieved using artificial filtration and a lot of work scrubbing the sides of the pond. Being a lazy gardener/ponder I prefer the natural look. My ponds have soil on the bottom and usually a layer of leaves. There's a lot of different plants and the water is crystal clear. That's my particular preference.

I'm lazy, poor, and I like natural when possible. I don't need crystal clear. I want something we can get into when it's too hot or we want to take some weight off aching joints, without coming out sick or gross; I want it to take care of itself without frequently throwing money or labor at it; I want it to improve the overall health of the yard and garden by attracting small animals: pollinators, predators to eat up the pest bugs, etc. I've seen a few wasps stop to get a drink but no bees so far (maybe when there are more plants in), and we've had a few dragonfly nymphs live to adulthood in there, and some frogs used it as theor nursery, so that's a good start.

Still no sand, turns out I can't use the pump right now either. Some of the minnows have died, maybe 20%... not good. The plecostomus is hanging in there just fine. The dead minnows seem to have gone in the night; coupled with the pleco's persistence and the plethora of single-cell green algae, I think the oxygen levels are just dropping too much at night when photosynthesis stops.

I put in 2 more, smaller plecos, and several samples of water hyacinth, water lettuce, parrot's feather, anacharis, and duckweed. They're only small amounts, but hopefully they will multiply (except the plecos, who need riverbanks and can't breed in the pool). Also put in some kind of barley extract that's supposed to help with breaking down dead things and clear the water without hurting the fish. And aquatic snails are multiplying in the pool, stowed away in the plants or possibly the pond mud sample I added for inoculation.

I would like to put in some azolla to shade and starve out the algae, but so far have been unable to acquire any.

Do you know the temperature range of the pond water?

Not offhand. I'm not sure it's wise to spend on a pool thermometer, when there will be no powered temperature adjustment. But I'm new at all of this. IS there a useful reason to monitor temperature, if the pond must fend for itself and won't be heated?

Temperature affects the amount of oxygen water can hold, the warmer the water the less oxygen. That in turn can affect the fish. Some, I think like minnows, need the higher oxygen to survive. More tropical types of fish are able to cope with less oxygenated water. There are also other factors involved in the oxygen content of water but temperature is a significant one. I use a cheap thermometer that was given out by a business for free and has their advertising on it. (It lets the fish know who to ring if their car breaks down, LOL.) But it does the job. Heating and cooling happens to the pond naturally. If you know the range then you can better select the pond life to add to your system, both animal and plant.

That makes sense. For now I'm kind of taking a selection pressure, function-or-be-evicted-the-hard-way approach, but for future planning, I can see how knowing the typical temperature range could be useful even if I don't plan to adjust it.

Minnows slowly but surely dying out, seemingly all of them over time. :( Plecos are hanging in there unconcerned, and have the sides scraped pretty clean, though the bottom is still dark green. Water itself is a murky green, still a lot of algae in there.

Acquired some bags of sand and gravel, work site leftovers damaged and dumped. Enough to have the car riding on its axles on the way home with it. I put in 1 bag as a test, from what it did to the water I'll need to rinse the rest first before I add it, but free is a good price. This should provide much more living space for cleanup microbes.

Not been able to acquire much more in the way of aquatic plants yet. I did get some moss-covered stones from a stream bottom, as well as some snails and a sample of the bottom mud. I'll put them in soon. I'm not sure quite what kind they are, but from the perspective of letting the pond sort itself out with selection pressure until it finds equilibrium, I think it makes sense to be inclusive, not exclusive. Either they'll fail and die, and just be nutrients to recycle, or they'll survive and find a niche in the system, or they'll survive and try to take over, until something else arrivesthat can take advantage of the overload and trim it back.

Try some fish that are native to your area, better chance of survival. All my fish are locals, don't have to buy them, they come to me.

I do know of a spot now with lots of minnows that are free to take, and pretty close to local (just the next county over). For now I want to refrain from adding more fish. Until the water is healthier, putting fish in seemingly just dooms them to slow death; amd while natural selection is a merciless process, putting them in when I know they can't take it seems unnecessarily cruel.

The idea of fish in a pool struck me a long while back when I saw an article about plecostomus used successfully for long-term pool maintenance in foreclosed rich people homes after the housing bubble burst. The plecos I have in there are doing just fine, and we pretty much leave each other alone. I'm in no hurry to pull them out, but I'm not trying to harm anything that needn't be harmed. I'm wondering if the backswimmers and dragonfly larvae that volunteered in there are predator enough to manage any late season mosquito larvae from the weird weather this year. I don't need a glorified aquarium here, if more fish aren't appropriate I'll do without them.

I got about 150 lbs of sand and gravel cleaned, and put it in the pool... slowly and carefully, to give the plecos time to dodge. Got a good bit left to wash, about 1,000 lbs total. It's not quite as much as I wanted, but I think it should help a lot with overall system health, given time.

If I can come up with a water-resistant frame to hang them on, I'm thinking about putting some earthenware pots around the sides of the pool, so I can plant bottom and marginal plants without worrying about them punching roots through the liner.

Didn't know minnows were a local for you. If they're dying then you do have a water issue. But whatever that issue is, it doesn't seem to be affecting your plecos. Your answer is going to be somewhere between the minnows and plecos and their water quality requirements.

It might be a species thing. The minnows in future mother-in-law's creek are smaller and have different markings than the ones I got from the bait shop; the ones at the park I won't take ("no fishing" signs and everything) look different from the bait shop minnows, too. But between the stillness of the water, the low amount of plant life (except single-cell algae, which is supposedly bad for taking oxygen back when there's no sunlight for photosynthesis), the minnows mainly dying at night, the decomposition cycle not having reached a healthy stabilization point yet, and the plecostomus (who can allegedly gulp air at the surface when oxygen is insufficient) surviving easily, it looks very likely that oxygen is the problem.

On the subject of insufficient plant life, about how long should the roots get on daughter plants of water lettuce and water hyacinth, before I cut the stolons and let them be new independent plants?

Glanced at it this morning on my way out to work, the bottom is (faintly) visible. Not sure which yet, but SOMETHING is working to clear it and reduce the single-cell algae.

Don't really know anything about Minnows but I'm getting the impression it's really a generic name for a number of different species of fish. On the oxygen issue, any body of water absorbs oxygen at the surface. The larger and more open the surface is the greater the absorption. Stronger wind also increases it. Many fish will gulp at the surface if water oxygen level is too low. I'd expect the Minnows would too.

It might pay to check whether your Minnows are intolerant of certain pH levels. Or even chemicals in the water you're using. Are you using tap water? Some fish are intolerant of water coming through copper pipes.

I don't have Water Hyacinth (the authorities would crucify me here if they found any on my place) but Water Lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) is a native. Daughter Water Lettuce plants can be separated just about any time they start producing their own roots. The roots don't have to be long.

Some people do use the term "minnow" as a generic (I know one that uses it for any baby fish, even), but there are several species of genuine minnow. I'm no fish expert, but comparing memory against photos of fish listed as living in this area, I'm thinking the bait shop sold me Pimephales Promelas ("fathead minnow") and the ones living in future mother-in-law's creek are Hybognathus Regius ("eastern silvery minnow"). Initially I wanted Gambusia Affinis ("mosquitofish"), but I couldn't find any local suppliers, and they're alleged to get along poorly with other fish, anyway. Fathead minnows turned up in a list of alternatives as good candidates for keeping mosquito larvae out of pools, troughs, and fountains, being hardy in cold weather and able to survive as foragers.

The water is (partially) tap water, but it's aged. July 29th I filled the pool from the garden hose, just city water and no chlorine. By August 3rd, the lady sent me out at night to investigate a possible intruder in the yard, and it turned out to be a frog living in the liner and singing for mates. ("Dear, you sent me out into the night, with a five foot length of wood, to beat up a thumb-sized frog." :D )

Around August 11th I found about 500 frog eggs floating in the pool, and some of them did make it to adulthood; not a lot though, the predatory insects in there are vicious. Over time the pool has lost water to evaporation and kid splashing (at least until we stopped using it for swimming); the only new water it has refilled with has been rain water, a tiny amount of tap water residue (not bothering to dry the sand and gravel after I clean it), a few buckets of wild pond/stream water from transporting live plants and animals, a minnow bucket full of whatever water was at the bait shop, and a couple incidents of the kid peeing in the pool.

I'm not sure of the chemical contents of the water at this point. Payday (as well as day off) is tomorrow, I may take a sample to a koi pond supply place not too far away; they test for free and they're where I got my most recent plant additions.

Gambusia have been introduced in lots of places around the world with disasterous results. They're the "Hollywood Piranhas" of the small fish world, they devour everything in their size range.

Luckily here we have a perfect mosquito larvae feeder that doesn't touch tadpoles, Delicate Blue-eye, Pseudomugil tenellus. I've got them in a number of ponds. The only thing is that some of the larger fish (even only a little larger) can wipe them out, especially the Chequered Rainbowfish, Melanotaenia splendida inornata. I call the Rainbowfish the "pigs of the fish world", they can't get enough to eat. And they breed like crazy too. So Blue-eyes are my most favourite and are mainly in ponds on their own.

It's a good idea to get the water tested. Koi are supposed to be pretty sensitive to water quality so a test geared to their needs should show up any possible problems.

I can just picture the tiny frog quivering with a huge lump of wood casting an ominous shadow over it.

I got some more duckweed, some azolla (finally!), anacharis, water lettuce, and water hyacinth, and added them today. The anacharis stems are getting longer and they're growing new leaves, but something is stripping off the old ones. I'm thinking snails may be eating it a little faster than it can grow; I hope the new addition will be enough to let it outpace the grazing.

I saw a pair of small dark torpedo shapes fleeing together as I added the new plants; it could be the plecos but they seemed a little too narrow. I think maybe just a couple of fathead minnows have hung on. SOMETHING alive in there is destroying mosquito larvae with extreme prejudice. The bloodsuckers are trying very hard to breed around there, and there are never any larvae present. Who knows, maybe my pool-pond is an attractive hazard for them, and will reduce the local population through interrupting the breeding cycle. If word gets out, I'll be the hit of the neighborhood.

I got a close view of one of the plecos (clinging to the bottom of the kid's toy boat), they're definitely growing bigger and strong, healthy, fast swimmers. Not just surviving but seem to be thriving.

The water test showed everything tested for is nominal, except nutrients which are surprisingly low, especially for having lots of algae and lots of dead stuff in there. Pond shop guy agreed with my guess that low oxygen is probably what's killed off most of the fish.

Mixed feelings about low nutrients in the pond. Positive side: the other plants are fighting the algae for food, it's not an all-you-can-eat buffet anymore. Negative side: it seems like my detritus breakdown and recycling microbes haven't taken a great hold yet. I got some heavy duty long gloves for work in water, should help with getting that sand and gravel cleaned without shredding my skin and sanding my fingernails away. I'm hoping to get another hundred pounds or so in before the storm hits today, but we'll see.

I really want this pond to work, in a self-sufficient way. Not only is the development and adaptation of living systems interesting, but if I can get it really healthy and robust, I might be able to put some tilapia in there, feed them from my worm bins, and turn junk mail and kitchen scraps into food by a route other than the garden. Would need to learn to clean and cook fish, though.

CORRECTION: There are some, sparse mosquito larvae, and I think I've spotted one of the killers, but I don't know anything about him. I got a few photos before I released him back into the water.

Strong swimmer, looks like powerful jaws. I spotted a mosquito larvae, and another bug just like this one except smaller and tan colored began to chase it with clear focus. What is this thing? Can/should I encourage them?

Searching around a little bit, I've got tentative guesses of the larvae of either the water scavenger beetle or the predacious diving beetle, but neither of those look like exact matches. Are those creatures that can come in a million different looks, like bold jumping spiders?

I've found that mosquitos are reluctant to lay eggs in water where fish live. Because they will always find somewhere to breed I've set up lots of water containers around my place where they can safely lay their eggs. Every week or so these get emptied into fish ponds. If a container is refilled with water from one of the fish ponds the mozzies never lay eggs in them. They seem to be able to detect that fish have been in the water and avoid it. So I use fresh water for refilling.

Those larvae do look like beetles of the Dytiscidae family. I found one in my "swamp pond" that was about 50 mm long. The closest to ID I got was Hyderodes species. They're voracious feeders on just about anything they can get a grip on. When I went to move it with a stick it attacked the stick and wouldn't let go. Defence or offence, they don't hang back. There are hundreds of different species so they would come in a lot of variations of size and colour.

Got some good photos of mine

That one's a little bit slimmer than even the tan mosquito hunter I couldn't get a photo of, but very similar in shape, overall proportions, and behavior. Probably different species but a close cousin. Well, that's good news. Mean biting monsters on mosquito larvae patrol can be arthropods, they don't need to be vertebrates. I'll have to study up on those beetles later, see what I can do to make the place more attractive to them. But not right now. I'm only up because roommate that leaves for work well before dawn needed a jump start for his car.

When I used to cut grass we had a customer with a pool going through the pool to pond transformation, but under a much less hands on approach. It was neat watching the trees growing out of cracks in the shallow end, and every time I mowed around it tons of frogs jumped back into the pool. The last summer before they had it filled there were 20-30 foot trees growing out of it and tons of aquatic plants. It was very cool to me, but definitely not a nice place for a soak.

Do you have any pictures?

It's pretty ugly at the moment, but I could get some pics.

I got a pleasant surprise this morning! I had thought all the minnows were dead, then I figured maybe 2 might have hung on, now I've found a school of maybe 70 fry. Them being second generation encourages me greatly; not only are minnows ABLE to breed in there, but to these guys this is home, normal, they might be better able to bear the local challenges.

The current lighting is pretty bad for photography through that murky water, but I got a few general gist of it pics.

The container for the pond. We do have a pump, but it's not currently operable. I don't really want to run it anyway, I'd rather see what cooperating and competing life can do for the health of the system.

The surface is still pretty bald, but we've got some plants in there, and they're growing. Duckweed, anacharis, water lettuce, water hyacinth, parrot's feather, azolla, and one water lily I'm trying out as a floater.

Gusty weather today shook them loose, but a LOT of dragonfly nymphs have taken flight from the hyacinths. I could clean up the skeletons cause they're kinda ugly piled like that, but I'm trying to get my debris breakdown system going, and it seems unwise to remove dead organic material right now.

Snails are multiplying. Not sure if they hitched a ride in from my co-worker's pond on the lily, came with the plants from the koi pond shop, or both. Found a few in the stream that I imported on purpose, but they're a different species and not pictured here.

Anacharis showing partial baldness, also some of my new azolla. Multiply quickly, cheap cover plant!

Backswimmers seem to be the dominant bug (just by population numbers) in the pond, but they're quick, camera-shy, and really hard to photograph in this light. The minnow fry, too, moved quickly to avoid me, and are very hard to spot in this light anyway.

That looks a lot like my above ground pool, except that mine has shade cloth over the walls to protect them from deterioration in the sun. And there's no ladder in mine. It does have a solar pump though.

This is one of the coolest garden experiments I have seen. Keep the updates coming!

For a while there it was oscillating - clearish one day, super murky the next - but now I feel cautiously optimistic in saying the single-celled algae is losing the fight for nutrients. String algae is getting thick around the sides, but the water is clear enough to see the toys William dropped in there. String algae is fine by me, that's food for the fish and the snails.

The minnows are still camera-shy as heck, but it's much easier to spot them with clearer water and some sunlight.

Ditto the backswimmers.

The azolla is becoming a deep red with the changing season, which really pops contrasted against the pale green of the duckweed. Both are spreading, slowly but surely.

Dragonfly nymphs keep emerging. There have been some failed metamorphosis fatalities, but many more success stories.

I had not realized anacharis is a flowering plant.

I work out in streams and a buddy there took home a dragonfly nymph, 'odie.' He would find little invertebrates while we were at work and bring them home for it to eat almost every day and raised the little guy all the way until it metamorphosed. It was cool seeing the pictures and video of it eating, they are tenacious.

How cold do your winters get? Are you going to need to do anything to winterize the pond?

For some reason I am no longer able to add photos, nor can I edit old posts; that kind of stinks.

Winter doesn't get very cold here, there is rarely some frost or a little snow, but it's not common, nor does it last long. I'm not planning to do anything to winterize this pond. A large part of its appeal is the adaptation and evolution of the system; from that perspective, the only reasonable winter plan is to let anything that can't stand the conditions die, and something else grow in to fill the niche.

I think the overall oxygen level is slowly but steadily improving. It's been a long while since I've found a fish corpse. Not only that, the minnows (adults and fry both) are cruising lower in the water, they aren't skimming just below the surface all the time anymore. I suspect adding the sand and gravel is helping that, in two ways: the decomposition cycle is starting to find a stable balance point, no longer robbing oxygen in big bursts; and some of the anacharis has anchored itself to the bottom, where any oxygen produced by photosynthesis must be exchanged into the water, not the air.

Bad news: water looks like murky crap again.

Good news: it looks like murky crap because of shredded string algae and stirred up sediment; I found time to clean and add another 200 lbs of sand and gravel this afternoon.

The pond currently smells like nothing at all, and I can see a dark scum growing up on the older gravel additions. I believe this is a good thing. To me, this implies that my idea of dramatically increasing surface area for underwater cleanup/recycling microbes to occupy was a good one, and it's working. I still need to come up with a practical solution for adding marginal plants, but I'll get there. Who says you need marshlands as a filter for a pumpless pond?

Water in above ground pools will cool down more than in an inground pond, especially when there is wind. Earth is a good insulator.

Although it's been a while and you said you still wanted to use the pool as a place to swim, but as the pool gets more and more yucky looking, I would refrain from using it for swimming. We can do it in some lakes and rivers because the water is moving. Your pool has become stagnant water. That's not bad for the plants and animals that you want to be using it as a water source, but don't use it as a swimming spot for people.

To add plants, you can put them in plant pots with some kind of growing medium. This includes overturned pots or structures that can help raise the height of the pot, for those plants that might not need to be so deep in the pond.

I can't seem to add pics to this thread anymore, but the pool is getting cleaner and cleaner. There is zero smell. The water is crystal clear. The sides are completely clean of carpet and string algae, the only visible algae left lives in the roots of the plants, and on the gravel I added to the bottom. Dead material hits bottom and nitrifying bacteria break it down into plant food, and then the fish and snails nibble on the plants. I never feed this pond at all, it just recycles waste and uses sunlight, cleaning itself so it doesn't starve.

I don't know how well it will do in the winter now that temperatures are finally dropping, but so far this setup seems to be robust and active. It even has the ability to clean up small-scale toxic spills: a bit of automotive grease got into the water by accident, and something broke it down within 2 days, it's gone. That last bit actually concerns me a little, though. If I do have petrochemical-eating fungus in the system, how long until it eats the plastic pool itself?

It gets back to the old business of "nothing is permanent". We had two steel reinforced concrete bridges start to subside because bacteria was eating into the steel. Don't know what they did to fix the bridges but they were closed for months for the repairs. There's bacteria that will also eat into rock. But aside from that, sunlight will be altering the chemical composition of the plastic. That's why I cover the walls of my aboveground pool/pond with shade cloth. Museums and art galleries have very low interior lighting to protect art/artifacts from breakdown of pigments.