Destination sanctuary… without the hassle of traveling anywhere or needing to make a reservation simplifies your life. Combining backyard ponds with waterfalls with a beautiful paving stones patio outdoor living area is exactly what you need in your life these days. A secluded haven of your very own you can simply step into upon arriving home. The combination will alter your very life and add mental and emotional therapy benefits unlike any other type of home improvement can offer.

Ponds and waterfalls are the ultimate backyard relaxation zone. Working water features into patio designs enhances your curb appeal and your lifestyle in one sweep of natural beauty. Today’s tumbled pavers for patio go with natural rocks and boulders so well, it’s like they were made for each other. Low maintenance biosystem ponds and no maintenance pavers are meant to be enjoyed, not add more chores to your hectic life.

Why not get rid of that drought stricken lawn and completely change your backyard into a garden pond wonderland? Backyard ponds don’t need to be huge in order to reap the many benefits they bestow. Small ponds or even pondless waterfalls can do so much for your personal peace of mind and your entire family. Picture how much different your backyard would be if you created one of these wonderful patio designs that incorporated the sound of moving water.

Waterscapes and patios are the perfect outdoor room setting. Imagine patio designs with living sculpture of crystal clear stream water flowing through it as a no barrier room division. Stepping from the outdoor kitchen into the outdoor living room could be done by crossing over the River Mine on a fascinating handcrafted bridge. Now that kind of lifestyle enhancement would be so uniquely wonderful. You could create just about any theme setting working backyard ponds into your pavers patio design.

Turning your hot tub zone into an outdoor spa is as simple as having waterfalls tumbling by right next to it. With two sides of the hot tub bordered by lovely tumbled pavers and the other two by your water garden pond and cascading falls, surely you have arrived in heaven on earth just hanging out at home.

Your backyard waterfalls and pond can easily be designed to create any dream location you want to escape to. A forest glade, a Japanese garden or a jungle paradise in Tahiti are all possible in the mild climate of Southern California. Accomplishing such a feat with ponds and pavers for patio isn’t really that difficult at all. Nor are streams and backyard ponds that expensive.

The first thing you should do is enlist the assistance of a really talented waterscapes designer who is also familiar with pavers. Landscaping companies who have done a large number of ponds and waterfalls installations, along with complicated patio designs will be the best design and installation company to pick. After all, if you are going to have heaven built in the backyard… Perfection is very important, even if your budget is on the smaller side. It isn’t that heaven will cost a king’s ransom; it’s the skill of the people who create it for you that will make all the difference in the world.

Strange weather patterns and abnormal pollutants have made for terrible fall and winter months across the west coast, especially for those of us with garden ponds! This transition brings a lot of new issues with our ponds but we remain diligent and soldier on. We will return our waterscapes to their natural, sparkling state.

With cooler temperatures, especially at night, you can expect that the world teeming beneath the surface of your garden pond begins to sleep and lay dormant. With the onset of consistent warm weather, everything begins to wake up, including bacteria. This is when the dreaded Algae reappear with the aggressive tendencies of Mike Tyson at a buffet of ears. If you're not careful, and you lose your majestic hold on these sacred garden ponds, you'll quickly end up with murky green pea soup.

Kinda makes you want to watch the Exorcist all over again.

Keeping water quality in ponds balanced always starts with planning and strategy. I hope that you made the effort to clean up all the debris that may have fallen during the fall season Don't forget about the things that blew through your yard such as trash or wrappers, dead leaves, etc. If you missed this one, and you let the ponds go on through the "cold" months, then you've got some work cut out for you.

You'll need to get all the debris out of your garden pond as quickly as possible. Use a net or skimmer to clean out the water as best you can. Check all your pumps and filtration systems, replacing and updating anything that needs to be tended to. Either clean the filters or replace them. If you clean them, rinse them in your pond water. Not all bacteria is bad and if you clean the filters too much you can kill off the good bacteria. This can greatly upset the balance in your garden pond.

If you can do so, take the time to vacuum your garden pond with a tool such as the muck vac. If you can't vacuum due to the design of your pond (heavy rock concentration, gravel, sand) then try using a formula like Microbe-Lift SA. This product speeds up the natural, biological degradation of organic waste on the bottom of garden ponds and will prevent increased levels of toxicity. Solutions like this come in a variety of packages designed for different seasons. This allows you to stay on top of the condition of your pond throughout the year. Preventative maintenance means you're not left with such an ordeal each "cleaning" season. Seasonal Microbe-lift is the best approach to maintaining a proper homeostasis in your garden pond.

Your primary focus when you're gearing up and cleaning your garden pond is to get the right bacteria to grow and come to life again. As the water warms over 55 degrees, bacteria that convert ammonia to nitrite begin to wake. These species of bacteria can convert deadly, toxic nitrites to harmless nitrate and make the environment much safer if you keep fish stocked in your garden pond.

Just keep in mind that the worst thing you can do is start over from scratch. If your pond becomes overwhelmed by sludge and algae, don't drain it! When you drain a pond out, you destroy all the good bacteria that have come to live in your garden pond. When you reset, the lack of bacteria stresses the aquatic life you have, whether its plants or fish. Stick with working with your aged water, and change no more than 30% of your water if you absolutely must.

It can be exciting to add a garden pond to the backyard. Everyone has a vision of how much more beautiful the entire outdoor living area will be with a sparkling pond and waterfalls to admire. They see this new landscape element in full bloom with perhaps some vibrant colored koi or fantails darting about in the clear water. It isn’t difficult to achieve such a focal point unless you overlook one very vital part of your vision.

The right pump for your garden pond is crucial. Even without adding ornamental fish to ponds, without the toxic chemicals that pond pump becomes an intrinsic part of your water quality system. Waterfalls can’t do the entire job of maintaining crystal clear water in your new pond. If your pump is too small or too big for the volume of water in the pond, several important things can go wrong and result in you having a high maintenance garden pond… or worse!

The water pump doesn’t just run the waterfalls; its function in the garden pond is multi-faceted. While it is important to install the pump exactly as the directions specify, an improperly functioning pump is not always the fault of the equipment. The pump is responsible for the right rate of filtering impurities from the water. This is very important to keeping your fish healthy and alive. The pump also manages the aeration in ponds which provides oxygen that your plants and koi need to thrive in the garden pond.

In order for your pump to remain in good working condition for a long time, it can’t be too small for the amount of water it is filtering. Too much pressure on the pump can cause your garden pond filtering system to wear out from the strain. By the same token, if you have insufficient water for the size of the garden pond pump, you can also wind up with the same result. So, getting the right sized pump for the job is vital to having fun and a relaxing experience with your new waterfalls and pond.
First, before buying the pump check the capacity it was designed to accommodate to get the full manufacturer’s stated life of use from the equipment.

Second, maintaining water quality for your beautiful koi is somewhat tricky. You can have a much easier time keeping the biosystem just right for the koi and your pocketbook with well aerated water that is sufficiently filtered. Too slow of a pump in koi ponds can result in instant and complete annihilation of your fish population. Garden pond plants do add some oxygen, as does your waterfalls, but the pump keeps all of this important stuff in balance when you match it to the size of your pond. This first thing you should check if your koi are acting strange is the pH and other levels of gasses in their water. Just like you, they can quickly suffocate without enough oxygen.

Do you need an external pump or a submersible pump for your garden pond? Submersible pumps for koi ponds won’t help out much if you have a good sized pond, they are adequate for smaller ponds with fish. When shopping for submersible pumps for the garden pond, matching the gallons per hour or GPH to the needs of your water plants or fishy friends is very, very important.

Solar pumps are available for your garden pond. The problem with relying on the sun to keep your pump operating at full speed and reliably is situating it where it will always have full strength sunlight. Shade will interrupt solar collection and can be a huge detriment to life in your pond. It can also cause you to have problems with waterfalls properly operating. Solar power is great, when there is sufficient sunshine, even part shade too many hours a day can mess up the power availability.

The best solution for most backyard ponds is a magnetic pump. This gives you reliable power to keep the filtering and oxygen maintained evenly and saves on the cost of operation. Additionally, magnetic garden pond pumps are very quiet, so you won’t have irritating sounds of machinery detracting from the soothing tranquility found in your waterfalls and pond feature.

Some people might view adding water features to the home landscape as unnecessary and frivolous. To them, only the necessities make sense as an expense. Most likely they do feel that having cable TV is a necessity, yet it offers nothing of intrinsic value. Watching television is not a lifestyle enhancement and a great deal of the time the entertainment value is highly questionable. Not only do waterfalls, streams and ponds enhance the intrinsic value of your property, they provide a natural source of entertainment for every member of your family.

A well designed and artistically installed water feature offers many very valuable forms of free and constantly renewable entertainment. The plants that thrive in a garden pond or stream add a dimension of natural beauty and visual richness not possible from the other types of ornamental plants we can grow in the soil of our landscaping. Having a natural looking landscape around Koi ponds and waterfalls is easier to present in a way that more vibrantly designed than trying to create one on dry soil.

The enchantment of lotus blossoming is something only those who have water features can enjoy at home. Additionally, growing plants like elephant ears in the pond or waterfalls makes them more handsome and less prone to pests due to drought stress. Growing all marginal plants in a garden pond reduces your irritation over their shortcomings rendering them far more entertaining in the landscape.

The garden pond adds loads of unique dimension to the view in its portion of the yard. The water bounces around more color and foliage than really exists near the surface. Bringing the sky to earth requires a mirror and garden pond water provides this feature. The water also mirrors the planting and increases the impact along with doubling the beauty of form and color. A small, very low maintenance planting in and around ponds will be more visually arresting and lovely to look at.

The forms of wildlife that waterfalls and ponds or streams attract to your property let your children absorb an excellent and entertaining form of education. Studying all the different new types of creatures that take up residence in their own backyard will keep them from being so easily bored. Toys are great, but they don’t give birth and change with each passing day or week. Frogs and fish are cool pets and no one has to walk them. They may not be furry and can’t sleep in your house, but they will entertain your offspring for countless hours free of charge.

It's not like ponds and waterfalls in your backyard will look like the water features next door or in anyone else's yard either. No matter how hard a person tried to duplicate a design in a second spot, it would never work out to their wishes. The boulders and rocks, unless cut to pattern, will never fit together in the same way twice. Only plastic ponds and waterfalls could look alike.

Last, but definitely not least, the music of cascading water is very entertaining. It is also a balm to your jangled nerves and will quickly become the center of everyone in your household’s attention. You will find that this natural source of entertainment provided by cascading waterfalls and garden pond pastimes has a profound effect on changing the way your family interacts in a very profound and positive way. No one can say the same thing for television, and cable is only sustainable if you keep sending them money every month. The effect of TV on a family is that it drives them apart quite naturally.

Stepping outside into your own private world can be any place you want it to be, like some magic transport system into a different reality. Reconnecting with nature makes outdoor living such an attractive use for what was once the forgotten space behind the house. There among the flora, your lounge chair becomes the throne from which to survey the magic kingdom. The best location for any castle will definitely be next to a source of crystal clear water burbling freely and musically. Waterfalls and quick moving streams are a wonderful focal point that moves from place to place in your outdoor living design.

Streams can be created to have more than one spot of cascading water. They can wander through your backyard or be a central focal point in one area. Since a stream is a smaller body of water than a garden pond, adding this kind of water feature will be less costly than you might imagine. You backyard stream can be a small feature and provide a great deal of soothing beauty. Longer streams can be an excellent way of getting the benefit of many different focal point areas.

In nature, streams don’t follow a straight path and adding them into your backyard landscape design allows a great deal of playfulness to their location. Working streams into the landscaping and patio design can open up views not possible with other forms of water features. Being able to make them drop over rapids to create waterfalls can be done just as easily as making them widen and then narrow.

Streams can start in the front yard at your steps and wander around to become an important element next to the patio. They can begin at a garden pond and meander to another area of the backyard to end in a waterfalls. Steams can trickle lazily along or move rapidly, frothing around rock placed in their path. You can dabble in water gardening with a stream just as you can with a garden pond. The types of plants you can grow in streams will be limited to those that thrive in shallow water or marginal bogs. Streams don’t allow the enjoyment of growing Koi, but connected to a garden pond you can have the beauty of both worlds.

For homeowners who are concerned about the safety of small children, streams can present the perfect solution. You can enjoy a much larger water feature with streams without the concerns of deep water dangers found in adding ponds to the yard. Streams are a bit like elongated pondless waterfalls, they just lengthen the distance between the cascades and the point of recirculation or disappearance.

Streams don’t need chemicals either when installed using biosystem filtering. It won’t matter if little feet wade through their shallow, sparkling water. Just like a garden pond, streams can provide your children with a limitless source of entertainment and discovery. Floating boats, studying dragonflies and watching tadpoles change into frogs is an excellent way for growing minds to pass time. All these forms of nature and learning fascinating stuff about water life can be found in streams and ponds at home.