Size (US Gallons): 150
Material: rigid dark grey opaque plastic
Lighting: one energy saver bulb hanging in a shop lamp-style dome
Filtration: One submersible powerhead with a large sponge filter on the intake tube. Venturi valve provides aeration
Substrate: None (bare bottomed pond)
Plants: floating salvinia and duckweed
Fish: 4 orange comets, 1 calico fantail, and 1 shubunkin (calico comet) named Spotty
Maintenance: 50-70% water changes every month or two.  Sponges are squeezed out into buckets of old water, bottom debris is vacuumed.  Re-filled with well water heated to 58-60 F.

Notes:

January 21, 2001

This pond has been set up in our unfinished concrete basement for over a year now.  We don't heat the water, but our basement is warm, so the water is usually 58-60 F.  We did not add gravel or sand to the bottom, which makes cleaning very easy.  Two of the comets are male and two are female.  The calico fish are both male.  We have seen little mating behavior in this pond - probably because they are at a constant, cool temperature.

I thought I would miss seeing the fish from the side, when we first set up the tank, but it really is beautiful to watch them from above.  It seems like a more natural viewing angle.  Eventually, we'd like to build a bench around the pond so that one can sit and peer into the water, but for now, we just have some folding chairs.

We feed the fish floating pond sticks from Tetra, mixed with occasional fresh or frozen vegetables, including their favorite, shelled green peas.  They also graze on the floating duckweed, which we replenish often from our other tanks.  I was worried about the floating food being hard to digest, but they seem to be doing very well on it.  It looks like puffed cereal, but despite its low density, it is a real bargain compared to most goldfish food.

One more note:  If you set up this sort of pond, don't fill the water up all of the way.  We found one of our goldfish on the floor a few months after the tank was set up.  We had just done a water change, and the water level was almost at the top.  Apparently, the fresh water made the fish a little frisky, and one popped right out of the tank.  We found her in time, and she recovered, but it scared me.  It doesn't look as pretty, but we now leave the water level down several inches.  If you have any small animals around, or if you locate the pond outside, be sure to put a piece of wood or other solid object in the water.  We had a red squirrel drown in our whiskey barrel pond outside.  The water level was about 6" down, and the squirrel couldn't climb the sides.  Now, we keep a piece of wood (branch) sticking out of the water just in case.

Here are some photos of our fish.  Click on any photo for a larger view.  These pictures were taken in the fall of 2000:
 

Spotty (left) and calico fantil (center)	One of our comets	All 6 goldfish
Spotty	Spotty dwarfed be comets (he has grown since this picture)	Our two calico fish together

These photos were all taken with our Nikon Cookpix 990 digital camera (scaled down and compressed for the web).  Feel free to write to me for more information or with any comments. Please do not copy or use these photos without contacting me for permission first.  Thanks!