Plants can be a great addition to your koi pond.
There are three types of pond plants:
Floaters, Drifters, and Potted. Drifters are pond plants such as anacharis and cabomba. They will eventually put down roots, but drift for the most part. Floaters are plants such as hyacinths and water lettuce. Planted ones are those such as water celery or cattails.
One main advantage of having plants in your koi pond is that they use up the nitrate in the pond water, which helps cut down on string algae and green water. Another advantage is that plants remove other toxins in the water, contributing to the overall health and water quality of your koi pond.
Pond plants also provide plant agglutination which are sticky proteins given off by the plant. The agglutinates are beneficial because they spread throughout the pond water and stick to organic molecules, bacteria, and other unwanted things in your koi pond. Once they stick to these things, they become coagulated and sink to the bottom. It is kind of like a hunter who shoots its prey and drags it down.
Without these molecules and bacteria, your pond water will be healthier and clearer. Pond plants will not clear a mineral haze, though, such as one from calcium. A final benefit of plants is that they provide philodina. Philodina is a small organism that lives on the plants. It has a tiny mouth on it, and basically it takes in pond water, removes bacteria and other organic molecules from it, and spits the pond water back out. This helps with the health and stability of the koi pond environment.
If you have pond plants, koi will sometimes attempt to eat them. You can lessen the damage from koi by having a higher number of plants; this will distribute koi damage over more plants and lessen damage to each individual plant. You can also lesson the damage by feeding your koi pelleted food. If they have this easy food source available, they will be less likely to do the work involved in eating plants.
If you want the benefits of plants in your koi pond but don’t want the plants accessible to your koi, you can keep the plants in a separate tub. You can then set the tub up near the koi pond and run the pond water through it in a vegetable filtration system; this is detailed in a separate article on our site. You can also put the plants in a separate gravel pond, or bog, and run filtration through there.
In summary, pond plants are very beneficial to your koi pond. They provide purification and water quality benefits. You can either put plants in the koi pond with your koi, or keep them in a separate tank in a vegetable filtration system.
