Mini pond, bullet proof fish, PopoSoap Solar Powered Pump

Hey guys, Andrew with the dirty tank.com and I'm looking outside right now and it's looking very nice. The weather's starting to warm up, I think we're way past the last frost, so you know what this means? It is officially tub season.

Setting Up a Tub for Rice Fish

Today, we're going to do an outdoor mini pond build, and I want to put Madaka rice fish in there and just breed a ton of these fish. They are the best mini pond fish that you can get, period. And I want to make sure that I set up the tub correctly and I want to make sure I have the right environment for these rice fish. So, today we're going to go to Daniel's house. He's very knowledgeable about Madaka rice fish. He has several tubs set up in his backyard, and he's had them going for a few years, so let's go ahead and drive over there and learn a few things.

Daniel's Experience with Rice Fish

Hey, my name is Daniel, and I keep rice fish outside. So, I've been keeping rice fish for about 3 years. I started with a collection of five or six, keeping them inside in an aquarium, and I really found out their true beauty comes from keeping them outside, their luminescence on their backs, as we'll see later. So, it's been a great 3 years, they've become one of my favorite fish. So, I've seen in the summer times, temperatures go up to 102° and then in the winter time, I've seen the temperature go down to 26° in the winter time.

Container Options and Filtration

Really any sort of food safe container will work for them. There's other options, you can have filtration like a sponge filter. I prefer water movement so that it increases the oxygenation of the water, especially in those hotter days. You can start with a small container, gradually move up, or you could start with a large container. Obviously, it's going to require more fish in order to fill it up, more plants to fill it up, but really any container will work for starting off with rice fish, as long as it's food safe. Check that it's food safe.

Family Involvement and Substrate

So, another reason that I like rice fish so much is, you know, as a family we're in our backyard all the time and right now I'm here with my son Brooks, and Brooks we're going to get some eggs off and put them in the baby in the baby pond. Can you grab a couple eggs? Oh look at that. Do you want to put them in the baby pond? Great technique. Oh great job, look at that. So, it's something that we that my son and I enjoy together, of course, he's usually playing basketball or or hitting balls into these tubs, but uh he also helps out, so I appreciate that.

So, I like a substrate less container just because occasionally in my maintenance, I like to vac the bottom and get all the debris out, but you could do some PE gravel if you if you chose, that might add some biological action at the bottom of the tub.

Plant Selection and Low Maintenance

Plant matter, hense horn wart, anaras, Water Lettuce are all good choices. For me, the horn wart and the anaras survive year round, so it's great that I don't have to replenish those from year to year. And there's also a lot of marginal pond plants out there um especially native ones like pickerel rush and others that you can put in containers. Now these can't be submersed, but you can make a ledge perhaps and add them to the outside.

For me, rice fish are one of my most appreciated outdoor fish just because of their luminescence on their back, the view from above, and the fact that they're generally not skittish. So, when you go outside, they sort of welcome you like a dog versus go and hide at the bottom of the pond. They're so easy to keep outside your round. You don't have to bring them in, you don't have to heat the the mini tub or pwn source. Like I said, just don't let it ice completely over in the winter and they're good to go.

The Charm of Rice Fish

Andrew, come let me show you what I was talking about of how personable these fish are. So here we go, we're out in my backyard here and as you can tell, they're not skittish, they're all coming to the top and you can see how much you can appreciate them from the top down view, the luminescence on their backs really why I recommend them as one of my top tub fish and they come in all different colors. I mean, I see orange and blue and black and white. I keep an assortment of colors in there. I don't really call my fish as the professionals say do, I like them to all live together.

Um, we're going to feed them some bug bites here and get them really excited, so we can we can see them all at once. But a look at a munchin I love it very friendly, excited to see you of course cuz that means they're getting fed and then you were mentioning that you have other fish that do well you never see them. Yeah, uh on the far right here, I bought some uh melanistic mosquito fish this spring and I put them in there. Beautiful fish from the side view or an aquarium view, but I don't see them um they don't sort of have that marking on their back, they don't come to the top. Again, that's why I recommend if you want to start with something perhaps start with rice fish and then you can really enjoy your experience with them outside.

Breeding Rice Fish

So, similar to Guppies with rice fish, all you need to do is get a male and female together and you'll likely have breeding action. I like to put several males and females together sort of colony breed them per se, but they will have eggs mostly every morning during the breeding season. If you want to keep and collect the eggs, I recommend a breeding or spawning mop and then remove those eggs to a separate container to raise the fry. But if you want to let nature take its course, you can also just let them breed naturally and I guarantee you some fry will survive and then become adults.

Fry Care and Breeding Setup

All right Andrew, so this is my main breeding setup where I have my adults and and some juveniles, but um I do put breeding mops in because my goal is to breed them. So, for example, I have a pretty standard yarn mop here and as you can see this is probably from a couple days of breeding. There's a ton of eggs, all the eggs that they've produced and in general you can either pick them off or I simply move the entire mop over to my fry setup and that's where I hatch out the fry. I wait until they become big enough size and then I reintroduce them back into the uh adult or Community Pond area here.

So um every day every morning the females are producing eggs and you should have a mop ready to go. You can make all these homemade, no need to buy them. This one here is a pool noodle with a Brillo scrub pad at the bottom, so there's many varieties of spawning mops that you can use and how long does it take for these eggs to hatch? I would say 7 days in temperatures between 70 to 80 degrees and the fry will come out. I like to start them off with first bites and then move them up to baby brine shrimp uh to get them up to size to reintroduce them back with the adults. This fry setup will naturally create its own green water especially as you feed them and being out in the sun all day.

So, to your point, green water is great for fry. Don't be afraid of green water um don't try to constantly change it out for fresh water because it is good for the fry and it provides a food source for them as well.

Identifying Viable Eggs and Plant Choices

So, when it comes to the eggs that are on here, how do we tell if they're good or bad? So yeah, not every egg is good. You will have some eggs that fungus over and they will become more white and Squishy. The viable good eggs will be hard. So, if you squeeze it between your fingers and it's hard, that should be a good viable egg. If if you squeeze it between your fingers and it's squishy um that is a bad egg. You don't really have to go through each egg. I like to keep actually have some of Andrew shrimp in my fry tank and they will sort of do the role of cleaning the eggs and any bad eggs they will consume it and get rid of it so that's a tip for how to maintain your eggs.

So, I see you have some plants in here at the moment and you have some more on this one too. What kind of plants are these? Sure, so this uh here is an acas um it's pretty easy to grow. I just stick it in here and it stays out here all year around. Here we have some horn wart which is another easy to grow plant, stays out here year round even in the winter um some frog bit duckweed floaters and then in the far Pond we have some high synth as well um the high synth really likes the warm summer temperatures and it likes to be crowded together so as the summer goes on these will multiply and sort of fill up the tub. They also produce a really nice flower once they're full and mature.

Maintenance, Sun Exposure, and Fish Selection

So, for me maintenance is all about the time you want to spend. It's a hobby that I really enjoy, so I go out there and do a water change once a week. Is it necessary? No, I like to do it because they do produce a decent amount of waste especially when you're feeding them daily. So, I will do about a 20% water change on my mini tub. I pay more attention to my fry tub in terms of doing bi-weekly water changes just to keep that water as clean as I can for the fry. I'm also heavily feeding the fry, so I like to keep it keep it nice and nice environment and reduce the ammonia, but you could really probably go the whole year without doing a water change besides just topping it off when necessary.

So, rice fish do appreciate 5 6 7even hours of sun per day. So, for that reason, I would say partial sun to Sunny Spot of your yard. If you want to have an air pump uh a heater which is not necessary but some people do for the winter time, obviously then you'd want to locate it somewhere near an outdoor electrical outlet, but to answer your question it does require they do require Sun especially for breeding purposes so I would say partially shaded to Sunny Spot is recommended.

There's so many fish that could go outside especially in the Carolinas in our summers, but what's most important I think to me is are you going to see this fish you know can you appreciate them? Are you just going to put them in in the beginning of the Season never see them and then see them again at the end of the season? For this reason, I tend to pick fish that look best from a top down view several Guppies rice fish from the top down you can see their backs. If you threw a pleco in there for example you might not see see it the whole summer, so I would think about visibly are you going to see these fish that you put in the pond and also remember the bioload for example goldfish produce a large bioload so to me I tend to stay away from them in mini ponds because of that reason.

Connecting with Daniel

So, I'm a member of the Charlotte aquarium club, we meet every third Saturday. You can find me there. You can also find me on Discord, I believe Andrew will drop my username as a part of this video so feel free to reach out with any of your mini tub or rice fish questions.

Setting Up the Mini Pond

Hey guys, it's been a couple days since we were at Daniel's house and I think we're ready to get this mini Pond up and going to breed a ton of rice fish. Uh Daniel, I can't thank you enough for the advice, the information and then all the stuff I got from you. Um, I got this 110 gallon tote uh from Daniel. Um, it already has an overflow spout and actually got it about a month ago from him, uh filled up with water. I'm having the cycling process going. I put a few fish in there and everything's looking good. Um, and not only did I get that tote from them I also got a few spawning mops let me show you here.

So, in here I got one of these spawning mops back here uh full of eggs and I even have a few more of my own that I'm going to throw in that tub um but there is actually a baby rice fish that hatched. This is one of Daniel's uh rice fish that was an egg that was on one of those spawning mops, it already hatched so it it probably been there for a week already um but yeah he's a tiny little thing. So, we got a good bit of eggs on there. So, they're slowly hatching they're in my shrimp tank now and then not only that um I have a fry tub that I have in the garage with all my other fish tanks and he me a big old bucket of baby freshly hatched uh fry. I'm looking in here, I put a lot of green water in here just so the fry have a ton of food, but I don't see any at the moment. Um, I was looking last night and I saw them swimming around but it's early in the morning I just turned the lights on so they may be snoozing, but I can't wait till those guys grow up.

Um, but now I think it's time to um make this t look very beautiful. We had a ton of plants to put in it and not only that I'm very excited about this solar pump um that we're going to talk about later that way I don't have to use any electricity. So, let's go ahead and dive into this.

Plant Selection and Pallet Backdrop

All right guys, we're in the garage now. We're about to put some things together, but you can see all the different plants that I have on this table and then I got some taller plants here and here um I'm going to talk in depth about these plants just in a little bit. But first, what we're going to work on is this palette. Now I had this palette laying around and I've been wanting to figure out how I can use this palette um for I don't know something and I had an amazing idea. This palette can be the backdrop of the mini pond. So, I had this fake privacy screen it I think I got it like Aldi um but we're going to attach it to this piece of plywood and I'm really just using zip ties to attach.

I think it took about two or three zip ties on each side um and that's going to hold it um just in case I didn't like it, I can easily cut it back off, but I think it looked all right. You can see the zip ties here holding it together and it's not too bad looking. I think this is going to be a good backdrop for the mini pond.

Substrate, Overflow, and Plant Elevation

So, I kind of have a time lapse of me putting this mini Pond together but I want to talk about some of the things I didn't show on camera. So, as far as the substrate, I do have play sand as the substrate. Now you can go bare bottom like Daniel was saying or you can use P gravel or any other type of gravel. I decided on playand because I had that laying around um but if you use playand it is very cheap um and affordable but you're going to have to rinse it out for hours. So, it took me a little while to get it cleared but uh we did clear it up. A couple other things about the tub so one of the things that if you never had a tub you may not think about this, but you do want to overflow about. So, you could build an overflow within the top inch of your tub or you can drill a hole um into the top inch of your tub however you want to go about it but essentially the reason why you want to overflow spot is because as it rains because it's outside this tub May overfill and if it gets too high your fish will jump out and your fish could die potentially but if you have an overflow spot that prevents it from getting too high of a water level um so keep that in mind as you're building your mini Pond.

Um, the other thing that I'm doing here is I'm actually using bricks and plastic pots to elevate some of the plants that I'm going to have growing out of it. So, if you're wondering you know how can I put these uh terrestrial plants inside the tub without it being completely submerged so this is a time to bust out those uh plastic pots that you've been saving or you can use bricks you got lots of different options but I use a combination of bricks and those plastic pots.

Monstera Propagation

Now I also decided to use this monstera that I had inside um it likes a shady indirect light which is perfect for the location that this tubs in um but it was a little bit too big so I did have to propagate this guy um it's not too difficult to propagate something like this. I normally massage all the soil off just so I can see what I'm working with and then uh it it will become very clear where you can kind of separate the plant um my goal whenever I'm breaking this plant into to multiple pieces is that each piece that is broken off I want it to have its own root system uh and I think I was able to break off I think uh three or four different pieces. Now this is another plant that can grow out of the tub right so and that's exactly what I did I have some of these pieces that are growing out of the tub and I did pot a few as well um to go on the outside of the tub just to kind of frame it in so it looks nice because this is right by uh my fire pit in my backyard but I think it's coming together nicely.

Solar Powered Pump and Filtration

All right guys, so before we do any more on the mini Pond outside in the backyard I wanted to go ahead and get the filtration set up and going just to make sure we have enough room and that it's moving the right way um so in this box we have a solar powered pump and that brings us to today's sponsor which is pop soap or poo soap. Um, now I wasn't planning to use a filter at all because I didn't want to use any electricity because I have about 30 fish tanks in my house and my electricity has doubled since I added that many aquariums in the house um so I didn't even think about a solar pump but when Papa soap reached out and was telling me about their solar powered pump I was like this is going to be perfect I'll get some filtration some water movement and it will look nice and it will not increase my energy bill so I'm really happy about that.

Um, I'm going to do an unboxing here just to see what we have in the box and then we're going to set it up in the mini Pond. You can order this on Amazon it comes in a ton of different sizes I got the 20 WT pump uh but they go from much larger ponds to even much smaller ponds they have like a six wat one um so they have solar powered pumps for all different sizes of mini ponds that you'll be building. Um, if we unbox this one let's see what we have haven't taken a look yet um we got a good bit in the Box it's well packaged um if I go ahead and open everything we see that it comes with some tubing oh I guess plastic hard plastic tubing and then it comes with the traditional I guess hose type tubing um we have some kind of steak here not sure what this is for but I guess we'll find out in a moment um I guess we have another bracket I think this will help angle it and then oh this must oh this is the solar panel this is probably about a foot maybe a little bit longer than a foot um but yeah okay so a good looking solar panel and what I like about this one this one's like heavy duty this isn't like flimsy that you can like roll up and break easily this one feels pretty sturdy pretty strong um so I'm liking the way that looks I want to get my eyes on the pump though I want to see what that looks like this may be the pump let's see Yep this is the pump so in here we have a pump um and it looks like it came undone here and I think that's left purposely because they do have extra little filter um I guess sponges now the main purpose of the sponges isn't for biological filtration even though it's going to act like that in some cases um it's really there just to make sure your pump doesn't get clogged up.

Um, now the other thing that I already like is how much cord you get so many times you get I don't know a light a heater something and it comes with like a 4T cord and what can you do with that you're so limited because the cord isn't long enough uh this cord seems to be fairly long which is good cuz I'm in a shaded area so I'm going to have to have the cord be long enough to get me to somewhere that has some kind of sun um and this is this is a good bit of uh of cord here so I'm happy about that I'm hoping it's enough to get me in the sunny area um and that's all we have in the Box we did a couple screws so let's go ahead and put this thing together and then we'll take it outside.

Pump Installation and Solar Panel Placement

So, installation wasn't too difficult but uh my only concern was is this thing going to be tall enough to kind of reach the surface and do what I wanted it to do and it actually reached like pretty much perfectly there was about I think it was about 2 in above the water um so which is perfect right it's not sticking way out of the water and it's it's not completely submerged where we can't really tell what's going on.

Um, I did have trouble getting it to stay in place because it does have suction cups at the bottom um but since I had sand down there I didn't move all the sand and so it just wasn't moving uh the way I want so I did have to use a brick on top of the pump at the bottom and that is holding it in place but now I got to install the solar panel and I think I'm going to install it on that tree because the Sun is up here and it goes down that way so a good part of the day it's going to be on that side of the tree so I'm going to mount it to the other side of the tree um and I'm hoping that's enough sun to get this thing powered um I'm going to put it here because although there's a little bit of shade right in maybe half an hour it will be completely full of sun all the way till the rest of the day um so that's why I kind of chose this spot here and then once you mount it you just kind of slide it on and it hooks on pretty easily.

Fountain Styles and Water Movement

Um, now the moment of truth, I got to plug it up and it was kind of overwhelming. I like that it wasn't huge and just spraying everywhere um so I played around with it a little bit and I I was able to get the fountain to be a little bit higher now I kind of like this I wanted something lowkey that isn't going to make a lot of noise I'm not a fan of the water noise although some people may um but I also wanted to try all the other tops to see all the different styles. Now this is one that created a little bit higher of a water feature wasn't too bad it looks nice but it's a little louder than what I wanted um but it looks good right it it has some water movement there surface agitation um so I think it's looking pretty good but we still have a another Knob to try um this one I think is going to spray higher potentially. So, it's not too difficult to replace it's all just uh friction fitted so if at any time you did want to change it it's really easy to do so uh so this Next Top uh did create a much larger Fountain uh and this one's pretty cool I kind of like this one but I think it was a little bit too big for my tub uh only because a good bit of the water was uh I guess spilling outside of the tub so over time this would cause a lot more work cuz I have to do a lot more topups so I decided to take this one off and stick with the one that I originally had on which is the Dome and the other thing that I saw is that you can also press that top part um of this piece into itself which allows for a bigger Dome and that's what I did so if you look here it's a decent Siz Dome and it looks nice it has water movement surface agitation without a ton of water noise um which is what I was going all right guys we have the pump in and I'm kind of liking that pump uh one thing I will tell you guys uh watch out for snakes.

Safety Precautions and Breeding Setup

I was out there I was setting up that solar panel I did didn't get it on video cuz right when I turned off the video to leave I almost stepped on a copper head um and it was a decent sized copper head so I'm probably that's that's one of the things when you're dealing with nature you're going to run into things like that um but I'll probably get uh I'll try to find some kind of organic deterrent to keep them away because I do want to sit around there I do hang out in the fireplace area a lot um so I'm going to have to make sure no snakes are around cuz I have children also uh so keep that in mind when you're setting up a mini Pond like this especially if it's going to be outdoors. Um, but the pump is looking really cool now as far as what is going to go inside the tub I am looking to breed madaka rice fish so I have some mops that I'm going to put in let me show you one of the mops here um I got a few different mops so we're going to put them in there and then as far as the babies I have just a very basic mini pond that's inside we actually already have babies in here Daniel gave me like a whole bucket full of his babies they're like Splinter size can't even see them but they're hanging out in here um but I'm going to put some of the mops I'll probably grab some guppy grass and I may do some Java moss as well and that way that if there are any babies that um are hatched and live within the tank um they have somewhere to hide and not get eaten so I'm hoping with the combination of using a spawning mop and picking the eggs and raising them uh without adult around and just having a lot of cover for them that um I'm going to have a ton of babies survive and I'm going to have a ton of rice fish by the end of the season uh fingers crossed guys.

Final Thoughts

Well guys, I hope you like this build. I hope you like the information about the mini Pond and the rice fish and I'll catch you guys next time see you oh.