What NOT to Buy
I have tried this product on my own pond and on a client's pond, and I think I can confidently day that it is a piece of crap. The concept is appealing to any ponder, but I would like it a whole lot better if it actually
It is important to have a pond thermometer for a number of reasons. The most obvious of which is to know when you can start feeding your fish in the spring, or stop feeding them in the fall. However, this is a FLOATING pond thermometer, which means that it will only tell you the water temperature in the top 6" of your pond. Fish don't typically swim within 6" of the top of the pond, and the water temperature at the middle or bottom of the pond can vary as much as 15 degrees from the top 6" during a change of season. Get yourself a SINKING pond thermometer for accurate readings of your water temperature down where the fish are living.
This is a total waste of good fish or plant-buying money. The concept is that the roots of the plants will have direct contact with the nutrients from the fish waste, which is floating around in your water, and the plants will florish. This is only true if you pot your marginals in 2" river rock. Therefore, they are completely useless for potting water lilies. Also, once the plants DO take root, the roots will snake through the openings in the plant basket and make a tangled mess. The only way to get the plant out of the basket when it's time to repot is to cut the basket apart. The WORST part about these plant baskets is that most people don't plant their aquatic plants in river rock. They use soil or heavy clay. I promise you, no matter how hard you try to be careful about placing these baskets in your pond, the soil particles in the basket will get sifted out into your pond water LONG before your plants have taken root, turning your pond water black (or red, or gray, if you are using clay). Don't buy them. Use a pot with NO holes, or better yet, use an old, black nursery pot that your neighbor-who-saves-everything saved, and line it with newspaper to block the holes and reduce the amount of soil that seeps into your pond. Once your plants get big enough, don't use a pot at all. Just rinse off the roots and slap them on your plant shelf. (Water lilies and lotus excluded.)