Before you put any fish into your new pond you should first install your aquatic plants and let them establish themselves for at least a month. Then test the water using one of the proprietary Pond Test Kits available from all good aquatic dealers or your Pondkeeping Club. Assuming the water tests are satisfactory, you can now think about the fish you want to obtain. Now is the time to work out how many fish your pond will support. There are numerous ways to estimate this figure but a good rule of thumb is to allow 6 inches of fish body (ie not including the tail) for each 2 square feet of pond surface area. Obviously, denser capacities can be achieved depending on the level of pond aeration and filtration installed, but this is outside the scope of this brief article.

Whatever you do, DO NOT rush out and buy a lot of fish in one go. It is far better when first starting a pond, to obtain five or six cheap goldfish and see how they settle in. If everything goes well, then is the time to decide on the other fish you want to acquire, and to buy them over the coming months. This will also give you more pleasure in visiting various aquatic outlets and selecting just the fish you REALLY want.

The best advice I can give anyone, is to stock the pond with Community Fish. That means fish that are happy to live together in an enclosed environment without attacking each other.

Listed below are the fish I personally recommend for Garden Ponds. If you want to have a lot of plants in your garden pond, forget about having Carp (Koi) as they are notorious in destroying most pond plants. The annoying thing is that they don't seem to actually eat the plants, just tear them to shreds and let the pond filtration system remove them.

For more details of fish suitable for garden ponds in the U.K., I suggest you obtain one of the specialist books listed in our Further Reading section.