Fishkeeping - Quick and dirty plant stands for preforms and ponds

I had made a bunch of stainless steel tube and mesh stands that
conformed to various preforms and barrel liners etc for my wifes
preforms......But with her never ending adding of more and more
preforms and half barrels, I ran out of the stainless steel materials.

Well I got a wild hair when it came to placing some more potted
plants in the various preforms...I hate playing around with rocks or
bricks or milk crates as they tend to take up way too much room and
cuts back on space available to fish.

I happened top habe a bunch of various PVC pipe of all diameters. A
bit of experimenting and I soon found most planting pots fit perfectly
into one size of tpVC or the other......I used some 10" pvc pipe cut
to length so it was sufficient to hold up pot to the distance I
needed. I used a hole saw to drill a bunch of holes around the sides
of the pipe for water flow and also to provice a "house" for the fish
(I normally house tropicals in these preforms and halaf barrels over
the warmer months) Pots aare tapered and set doewn in these short
pieces of pipe just fine, and are very stable due to diameter and
heights. I also have submerged lights in most of these water features,
so I just slipped the lights inside the PVC pipe stands. Its perfect,
as it diffuses the light 360 deg around the half barrels etc and
gives that perfect shadow illusion at night.

PVC is easy to paint with Krylon Fusion Paint and once dry is inert
and will not harm fish or plants......You can usually find lots of
short scraps of large diameter PVC pipe aorund construction sites.
Just ask or check out their collection dumpsters. Its quite common
around these parts.

-------
I forgot more about ponds and koi than I'll ever know!