Algae is probably the pond owners biggest problem and people try everything to get rid of it, even barley straw. This is becoming a common method and companies are even selling bags of it for small back yard ponds, but does it actually work?
If you think about it for a minute, it does not make any sense. Why would barley straw work? Why not some other kind of straw?
Even if it does work, it seems a shame to use it in a pond rather than make beer out of it!
About 7 years ago I started developing various water features, both garden ponds and water falls. As part of my research I found consistent comments like the following: you can’t make a natural pond using a pond liner without pumps and filters. The use of the word ‘natural’ here refers to the pond filtration system, not the esthetic look of the pond. I’ll deal with esthetics in a future post on how to build ponds.
In a natural pond the water, soil, plants, and animals all live in harmony. No one comes along to clean the pond or to aerate it. There is no big man-made filtration system that keeps the water clean. The common advice is that a pond liner is artificial and a pond built with it will never reach a natural state where the water, plants, and animals live in harmony the way they do in a natural pond. If you don’t filter such an unnatural pond it will become full of algae and the water will be dirty and smelly. The only way to have a pond with a liner is to add aeration and filtration.
Is this really true? Do you need pumps and filters to provide artificial pond filtration?
