Aquatic Planters For The Pool Pond! Pitcher Plants Papyrus Canna Elephant Ears

Oh, this just fell on my foot. What are you? You're a caterpillar. You're a very hairy caterpillar. Oh, you need some nair. Look at the eyes on that thing. A moth or a butterfly. So many different types, it's hard to identify them. Man, I've never seen, look at those eyeballs. Never seen eyes on a caterpillar that big before. Those are like some crazy, like villain Marvel eyeballs. What was that? The fly, that's what I'm, oh, oh, oh. I don't know what to do with you. I'm not gonna kill it, it seems mean. A hornworm or anything that's like damaging. What are you? Well, I mean, it's a cat, it's probably damaging. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's my place to kill it though. Just don't, don't crawl on me. Just stay off of me, please. People are always saying if you feed your koi enough, they won't eat your plants. Yeah, that's not true. These guys are fat, they still, they eat my plants. I think it's just a matter of habits. Sometimes they get into it, sometimes they don't. This week's vlog is a little bit different. The reasoning for that is that there's that tropical storm brewing down in the Gulf of Mexico and I'm nowhere near that really, but straight up above where it's supposed to hit, I live up in St. Louis. Not in any danger or anything like that, but it's supposed to start raining and raining and raining and raining for several days. That starts tomorrow, so I gotta like get something done today. I wanna make sure I have a vlog to release, right? Anyways, so here's what I'm going to do. I've wanted to put together a very easy aquatic planter for a while to put there in my koi pond, and oh, someone needs to go to the bathroom. This is what's nice about a vlog. I can just ramble and don't have to make sense. However, I will say, and I should have said this at the very beginning, the aquatic planter, I will put the time down below for when that's going to start, even though it's gonna be basically right now. Gonna go ahead and use the nice camera for this. Mostly just because I need the tripod. Think it'll be easier that way. Take that off, turn you on. I am aware. All right, let's do this. Starters, I just have a basic plastic pot here, just a nursery pot, has some holes in the bottom. This is going to be a marginal type planter. Really, airplane? I don't have a lot of time left on my memory card. All right, plane's gone. That gave me an opportunity to go ahead and get my plants out. So for starters, I'm gonna go ahead and pour some of this pea gravel in here. I'm just putting it so that it's just above the holes in the bottom of the pot. Still, some is going to seep out. Any type of rock will work. If you have a larger rock, that'll work. Newspaper will work to line this. Even coconut liner, you put a hanging basket, that would work fine. I just have a lot of extra pea gravel, so that's what I'm using. I also wanted to use gravel just because I like the flow that will go through it a little bit more. And for potting soil, I'm using this organic, all-natural potting mix. I picked this up from Lowe's. You don't even have to use a potting soil. I don't have to use a potting soil. Oh, hey, creeper, what you doing? Could fill this all the way up with gravel, sand. Some people will use an all-natural clay cat litter. Top soil, a little bit more risky with the fish. I have fish where this is going because there could be pesticides and things in there. So that's why I want to make sure I'm using something that's organic. I can already see this has a pretty heavy amount of perlite and sand in it, which isn't necessarily ideal for what I'm doing, but that's all right. It will still work. All the plants I'm using in here were from the aquatic nursery. They had already been in an aquatic setup, so I don't really have to worry about flushing their roots out completely. If they weren't sold specifically for an aquatic setup, then I would not want any of the remaining soil in here, and that's because it could have pesticides and chemicals in it, which wouldn't be great for the fish. That's a canna indica I've thrown in there. And you can see here, this dwarf papyrus I'm moving over into here, this is potted up in basically just pure sand. Yeah, there's no soil in there. That's just sand, which is totally fine. Jam that down in there. I don't mind if it sticks up a little bit. I want it down lower than that. While things are kind of open, I'm gonna go ahead and start moving my soil back and filling in the gaps here. This next plant requires a little bit of explanation. This is a black coral elephant here that I got on clearance. It was 25 cents, and yeah, that's why it looks like this. These are colocages. They grow like crazy, especially once they get into that water with the fish and all the nutrients in there, it'll recover just fine. I'm not worried about it. And hey, that was cheap. Definitely not gonna catch me complaining about 25 cents. This really didn't have much going on with its roots, so I got a lot of the soil off of there. All right, these leaves are looking like garbage. They're not even facing up to get the sun, so I'm taking them off. Usually I recommend leaving something on there, something to photosynthesize, but they're hanging upside down. They're not gonna do that much anyway, so this way it's gonna be able to put its energy towards putting its roots out and getting going again. Okay, and now for the pennywort. Oh, look at the roots on that. I was thinking I'd be able to divide this up no problem, but I think it actually might be a little bit more of a challenge than I thought. Trying to kind of loosen things up along one side, pull those runners apart. Spread this and line the front of the planter with it. Now I'm going to top dress this with some pea gravel. Oh, okay, that came out in a big clump. Spread that around. I want the gravel on top to keep dirt from falling out of this should it rain heavily or anything like that, or if a fish should jump up there and flop around. Koi are known to be jumpy. And then water it in. I wanna flush this out really, really well. I know that it's up a little bit high, but I used pea gravel in the bottom. It's all I had. I wasn't gonna go out and buy anything else when I had that. It's perfectly good, but I didn't have newspaper or anything else to line it with. So some gravel is going to come out, which is fine. It's not gonna hurt anything, but it is gonna bring the level down of the soil. So I wanted to leave a little bit of room in there. It's fine. In here in the very back is a dwarf papyrus. This is just about full grown. I guess it could probably put on about another foot or so, but it probably won't this year. It is a very heavy spreader. Excellent plant at cleaning your water out. Actually really everything in here is. Next to it is a canna indica. This has nice burgundy kind of greenish red foliage on it and really pretty red flowers. That stalk's pretty much done flowering though. That'll get about four feet high, maybe even a little bit higher. Whereas this black coral elephant ear that you can't really tell exists anymore, that'll get about 30 to 36 inches high. Probably not this year though. And then here in the front, this is the plant that got me to do this entire thing. This is a pennywort. It's an excellent spreader. I mean, really can practically be invasive. It just grows like crazy. Another great marginal plant. Doesn't need to be submerged. It just needs to have wet feet. But it can be submerged, I think, up to like a couple inches. I can't do it though because my koi are going to eat them. That's why I did this. Over time, this will fill out even more and look pretty cool. So I'm gonna go ahead and move this over to the pool pond and we'll have a look at it over there. Yeah, there we go. You can see all these scraps in here. This is from the koi chewing on it before I potted this up. Now it's up higher, so they'll have a little bit more trouble getting to it, but they still put out runners that will come down the sides. That's all right. They can snack on it. I just don't want them to devour it. Hence why I have to keep my water hyacinths in my filter. Yeah, I'm happy to have that done. Like how it turned out, you can see it is a few inches above the water, but you can see the water is well above those holes and to the soil lines to the moisture and there should wick up to the roots of the plants. Yeah, this will work out just fine. Like I said, these are all marginal. These could go a few inches underwater even and would probably be completely and totally fine, but this is what's best for me because the fish can't eat the plants this way. Yeah, they're pigs. Oh, and there are a couple other things I wanted to mention with this. First off, if I were planting this up in late spring, early summer, or really just a few weeks ago, I would put this in a pot that's at least twice the size of this. Everything that's in here is going to grow like crazy. This dwarf papyrus, like I said, this one's about full grown. There are different varieties. There's the little tut from Proven Winners, which only gets about 12 to 18 inches tall. This could be that. I really don't know. The standard varieties get about two to three feet tall. That being said, I would put the alocasia behind it because that's going to grow up above it over time and I would use a tropicana instead of just the canna indica because the tropicana, as you can kind of see here, that's a little bit better, has really pretty colorful foliage and the indica is a kind of a black foliage, almost like the black coral. So those are going to kind of blend together, whereas these would contrast and be really colorful and really, really, really neat looking. Holy crap, that plane is flying really low. See how low that plane is? And there's not an airport that direction, so that's kind of alarming that it's going down. Huh, let's hope everything's okay there. One last thing I want to do here. I have this big plant basket here and that's because I want to get something set up that I can put my cuttings in and start getting things propagated and rooted because fall's just around the corner. I have this rock here that's actually made for hydroponics and aquaponics. It's pH neutral and has really good surface area on it for bacterial growth, so you have good biological filtration and all that good stuff going on. It says it contains silica for superior plant growth. Yeah, I don't know about all that, but here's the thing. I don't have enough. The red lava rock is going to provide those exact same benefits. The only downside, the red is kind of irrelevant. I'm only saying it's red because, well, dusty. You got to wash all that off first. So I'm going to get all that washed off. I'm going to top it with the other rock I just showed you and then get some cuttings going and move forward. Hey, there it is. So I have the setup underneath that waterfall filter. So the water is moving through there. It's circulating. I got as much of the dust out as I could. It takes a really long time to rinse that red lava rock out, but it actually, it went faster than normal. So I'm hoping I didn't miss like a big pocket of it. Usually it's easier to spread it out flat and rinse it off and then gather it. I was just moving on kind of quick because the sun's about to set. Like I mentioned, this is primarily for cutting. So I went around, got some clippings. These are from my pothos. This one is from the neon pothos. It's a green one. And then the marble queen. And they're not in focus, sorry. All right, and that's it. Nothing complicated. I don't need to bury them very deep. They're going to be in contact with the moisture from those rocks and they will root down into it, no problem, all by themselves. All right, and while I'm at it, I do also have some of these sericinia here. These are pitcher plants. They were basically given to me at one of the nurseries because, yeah, they're not looking too hot. I don't have time to repot these right now and I won't for a little while. So I'm going to go ahead and just plop them in here. All right, so there we go. I sink those down so that the bottoms of their pots are just barely in contact with the water. The water could go pretty much almost to the base of them. That'd be fine. Main thing is that it's in contact so it will definitely wick it out because they need constant moisture. Over time, I'll be putting more in here, probably some clippings from my dragon's wing, begonias, really just whatever I come across. Main thing right now is I just wanted to get it set up. And pothos are one of the easiest things to root and they are great to have in a setup like this because they are nutrient hogs. They will keep this water really clean, almost too clean. They may suck out too much nutrient. I don't know. As it is, I have this, I have two filters set up on here because I need the TDS to be fairly low for the saracenias and the nutrient content can't be out of control for the fish. So hopefully things will stay in balance. I don't think these have enough time to take off and suck everything out of the water and completely deplete it so it should be all right, just because there's not that much time left in the year. This planter, I will be moving into my growth space this winter. I'll have to cut the cannabac and probably the pennywort, but either way, that papyrus, that should keep going and I'll repot it next year. Should do okay in there as long as, you know, the water stays warm enough for it, shouldn't be a problem. That's the challenge though, is keeping the water warm when it's like 20 degrees outside. Even with all the insulation and heaters, it's still hard to keep that space really warm if it's below 20 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit outdoors. Then just a couple of other things to note. With this much rock in here, it's very porous. That lava rock is going to provide a lot of surface air for bacteria to grow, which I mentioned before, but to get a little bit more in depth, I'm talking about beneficial bacteria, nitrifying bacteria, bacteria that processes ammonia, nitrite, nitrates. This is something that's in the biological part of our filters in any aquatic system and it's good to have. What it does is it's basically like the gut of your tank or of your pool pond, whatever your environment is, it's processing the waste from the fish in the environment. So it's good to have, but this and this planter, they're very large. They're both going to establish bacteria. These two filters back here already have a ton of biological medium in them, so it shouldn't be a problem, but I'm still going to keep an eye on this to make sure that my levels don't fluctuate or anything crazy. Because stability is always key to a good aquatic environment. Consistency. I really like these pitcher plants. They're pretty cool. If you didn't know the reason I'm not potting these up right now, I don't know how you'd know because I didn't tell you, they need to be potted up in pee, a medium that doesn't really have much nutrient in it. I don't have any and it's going to be a minute till I can get out and buy some. They don't really take nutrient up from the soil. They take it from inside their pitchers. Insects crawl on in there. They go down inside that tube, get stuck, die, and decay, and release nitrogen and all the things they need to survive. Like a Venus flytrap, kinda. Okay, I'm done with this. The sun's going to be setting soon and I gotta get some stuff done. More into regular plants. I finally found some Recurvefolias. If you've watched my vlogs, I've mentioned several times I've been trying to find Yucca Recurvefolia, Yucca pendula. I got one many years ago in Seattle, Washington when I was a kid. I used to spend a lot of my summers there visiting my aunt, and from a nursery I think it was called Molebox up there. Not something I've ever been able to find for sale here in St. Louis. So it's been like 16 years, 15 years I've been trying to find more of them. They're awesome Yuccas. They're not fully hardy here. They're rated zone seven and up, which I don't see as a really good reason for the nurseries to not sell them because it doesn't stop them from selling things that are rated for zone eight and up as perennials at like Lowe's and Home Depot, which they shouldn't be doing, but they do. The one I've had has been moved around several times. It hasn't put on a ton of growth because I really haven't done a ton to it. I just recently put it on irrigation and I tossed some fertilizer on it in the springtime. But they're low maintenance. But if you give, wait, what am I doing? I'm gonna do a whole separate video on these guys because I absolutely love them. But the thing I like about them is one, I like their foliage. It has the powder on it. It's kind of a glaucous grayish green color. They get really neat trunks on them. They look similar to kind of like a ponytail palm and they're hardy. I'm in zone six, right in the line of 6A, 6B, so not fully hardy here, but the one I've had has been doing great. Hasn't grown a ton, but it hasn't fallen over either. Maybe has like eight inches to a foot of trunk on it after all this time, but with a better soil and whatnot. Why am I still talking about this? I'm gonna do a separate video on them. I'm just really excited I found them for sale. That's all that that's about. Very happy. They're gonna get their own quick spotlight video so I can talk about why I think they're so awesome and I like put pictures up and all those things. And it's probably gonna be kind of redundant from everything I just said because I rambled too much there. Add this wagon planter over here. I have fall planters everywhere. I've been filming like a crazy person. With that rain coming next week, I want to get everything done while I can. I haven't gotten the Halloween ones done yet. So I can't really show you what else is over here except, well, no, but you've seen the wagon and I asked everybody if I should put some Creeping Jenny in it and it was pretty mixed. I love y'all, but guys, weren't that helpful? A lot of people said no, a lot of people said yes and a lot of people said, eh, maybe, maybe not. Do whatever you want. Do what you like, which I appreciate. So I'm just gonna leave it because like I've mentioned, annuals and, I mean, Creeping Jenny's kind of a perennial where I live but it's often sold as an annual and they're getting harder and harder to find and I think I need them for the Halloween planters that I'll have coming up. So I'm just gonna leave it without for now. Oh, someone lost their head. That sucks. Sorry, bud. Not really. Creepy. So I have one other video I need to do and that's my orchids, the ones that are in bloom. So I need to get that done. I don't think I can do it tonight. Hopefully tomorrow morning and that'll be out next week. I have so much cleaning to do. You guys, oh my goodness. Now, before you judge, I've done 12 different planters in this spot. So it's actually not that messy. I've been trying to, believe it or not, clean in between takes. It's just so much dirt. I don't actually even like to film that many videos back to back. One, because I start to lose my voice and when they come out, it's like three weeks after I've done them and that's, I don't know. I don't always like that. I like it to be a little bit more fresh but with the weather, it just kind of seemed like that was probably the best way to do it. You know, you just gotta roll with the punches sometimes. Make things work for ya. These sweet potato vines, I'm over them. I'm going to cut them out probably next week. They're getting really shabby. The dogs have been running all around, destroying everything that's in here. I think I'd rather just look at nice clean pots. Not just look at nice clean pots. It's also time to go ahead and get these guys boosted on their last few fertilizings of the year. So I have to get rolling on that and I want the palms to get the fertilizer. I don't care about the sweet potato vines. They're cheap. It's not a big deal. I could take a cutting of those, put them in that basket we just threw together over there or that I just threw together over there and I mean, it'll grow probably six feet in a month. They get huge. They're monsters. But you can see, the dogs have shredded them up from around the pots. So I'd rather just get them out there and let the palms get all that fertilizer and everything. Not have to share with the annuals that are around them. And insecticides. Some people don't like them, but I can't have bugs in my growth space because once that growth space is set up, it's indoors, the koi pond's in there, the pool pond. I can't use chemicals. And there are lots of natural remedies and whatnot, but even those I don't like near the water. So I like to get a slow release or something down about three months prior to them going in in September, October, November. Usually they're in by Thanksgiving. So I'm right around that time as it is. Oh my goodness. I was talking very fast in this vlog. I'm so sorry. I was rushing. I had to get things done. I'm gonna wrap it up. Oh wait, no, no, no. One thing I wanna show you. I mentioned back in my last garden tour that I would show off this lespedeza when it went into bloom because it's probably still a couple of weeks from when I do the garden tour. Here it is. Look at that. What a beautiful fountain. They come up, they cascade, they flow like crazy. I mean, this is on a wall. That wall's about, I don't know, three feet high and it still comes up, cascades over to a weed vine in there. And yeah, it's just beautiful. I think they're absolutely gorgeous and the pollinators love this plant. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure I showed that in case it's out of flower by the time I do the garden tour. There's that. But anyways, I hope everybody's doing well. Don't forget to give the video a thumbs up. It helps so, so much and I really appreciate it. Subscribe as well. It's actually down there. I upload multiple times a week. I have all my social media linked down below, down there in the roots of the video. Follow me and I'll follow you back. I love seeing everybody's pictures and I use Instagram more than anything else by far. Comment down below and say hi. I love talking to y'all. All right though, that's gonna do it. As always and most importantly, keep on growing everybody. Bye bye.