This is my pond towards the end of Winter. The Koi & Goldfish have grown during summer and coming into autumn. The fish are still active even through to the end of Winter. I fed the fish a generous handful only once a week as to keep them in shape during this cold sluggish period. And, as you can see, my 1st year lilies have gone dormant but are still keeping their shoots. We’ve had quite a bit of raining which worked well to add some clean water to the pond. I never built a skimmer box as I didn’t want to add more power usage to the pond (keeping the pump running 24/7 was expensive enough, not to mention the UV clarifiers). Plus, I used the pump which i connected to an external hose to flush out the excess water to my garden – so all worked out fine. Overall no regrets. I was happy to do some upkeeping of the pond. The way I see it is that if you’re going to built a pond, you can’t be lazy and expect the pond to automatically clean itself (unless you spend a lot of money in equipment – but I only spent 00 in total for everything related to this pond), so scooping leaves during autumn is a must and removing unwanted moss or algae from your waterfall etc. was generally the upkeep of the pond experience. You are always going to find algae on the sides of your pond even if you don;t have sun shining directly on it. My UV clarifiers worked well to zap the algae and I have never had problems of algae water. My water was always clear and clean. My shading cloth also worked …