I dont know how to achieve this as the filter is partly buried. So I've like dug behind the resevoir to house the filter. The liner isn't long enough to go round the filter as well. Il look into it and work something out. I would need to try and slope the ground to fill towards the falls without making the filter not level!
I have 3 plants in the wildlife pond. Two drooping sedge and a yellow marsh marigold which I know are more bog plants. I was thinking some pond forget me nots and I need a good oxygenating plant! I have no lillies. The filter has uv. Will that help with the algae? I'm hoping by mid September its done. Add two goldfish before winter
if you can take a piece of liner and form a basket around and under your filter, with the front-pondface side open, if you get any overflow, it'llbe caught and be forced to flow forward toward your falls. You can put rocks around and on to hide it. That's what I did with mine.
The sedge is a good pond filter plant, the marsh marigold IS more a marginal but if there's contact with pond water, will still help. Careful re oxygenators; they DO release O2 during the day but they use it up at night. In a small pond, it might be more harmful than beneficial as those types can take over before you know it. I'd keep this herd of oxygenators managed, not letting it have more than a third of my pond floor, if it were me.
The UV, while it can be effective, is only a bandaid to any real problem. If you have plants and a balanced pond, the UV will be unnecessary. I've never had one and only upon expanding my pond last summer, did I experience 2 weeks of algae bloom from the sudden addition of more than 2/3 volume of new water. It went away and I've never suffered since. This was because I have lots of plants, a bog, 60% surface coverage and don't overfeed. A small pond is much harder to keep in balance than a larger one, so be aware. Your parameters will go out of whack much quicker than mine, so you have to stay up on monitoring fish behavior and a general eye test to make sure nothing is amiss.
The basic idea is to have all the elements you need for balancing, in place. A small number of fish is part of this. If you get an algae bloom, don't sweat it, it'll pass if all the other things are there to eventually curtail this natural problem. See, the fish are actually being protected from the toxic ammonia levels that could exist before any balance is achieved. So, that's why you don't go killing it with UV or chemicals. Time is your friend, time and lots of plants and biofiltering material. That's why you'll see so many here touting a bog filter--lots of plants and even more volume of surface area for the bacteria to colonoize. Without one, all you'll have is the bioballs and your pond surface. Read some of the threads re bog filters and consider putting one in--can't say enough about how beneficial it really is. Solves a lot of problems right from the start. If you keep the fish load low and don't over feed, you should be okay--just realize how quickly it can go bad if you over feed or don't monitor regularly.