General Pond Maintenance: Keep you pond clean of debris. Prune yellowed/browned plant foliage, lily pads and spent flower buds. Cut or pinch them off as near the container as possible. You can usually tell if a lily’s flower bud has flowered if it is curled and limp. A new bud will be erect. Net out leaves and other debris that blow into the pond. Avoid your fish as much as possible when doing this. Prune your shelf plants occasionally. Maintain good circulation, (ponds under 1000 gallons turn over 2+ times every hr.). Routinely use some kind of maintenance bacteria from mid-March — mid-November to maintain a cleaner pond. The fine debris in the bottom of the pond is typically removed one of two ways. First, waste eating bacteria you add on a regular basis. It seeks out organic waste like fish feces and uneaten food and eats it up, even in your filter. It won’t get all of it, but it sure keeps it down. Your second option is to physically remove it by vacuuming it up with a shop-vac or some other type of vacuuming device. Your fish won’t die if you don’t do this, but the chances for illness will be decreased and organic waste contributes to algae blooms. Filter maintenance: If you have a submersible pump and it has a pre-filter consisting of foam you’re going to be sticking your hand in the pond on a regular basis to retrieve the gunked-up foam and spraying it out. Here’s a tip, consider purchasing a skimmer and getting your pump out of the pond.  A skimmer is a box that sits on the edge of the pond; (there are skimmers for liner ponds and preformed ponds).  The box is buried in the ground and “connects” to the pond’s edge, (we won’t confuse you with all the installation details, but they’re easy to install and you hide them with rock). The skimmer “sucks” water in from the top of the pond collecting floating debris. This keeps the pond’s surface clean and positions your pump inside the skimmer box, removing it from the pond; improving aesthetics, and making routine pump maintenance much easier. If you’re not ready to get a skimmer you can at least change your prefilter to a 1-3gal container of bio-balls, bio-ribbon or even large river gravel. You won’t have to clean it near as often and your pump will not be as prone to clogging & burning up. The goal is to increase the surface size of the prefilter and to make the foam, bio-balls, etc… as open and porous as possible. This will let more of the fine, small debris pass through to an external filter and reduce the frequency of cleaning the in-pond prefilter. Footnote: do not clean your filter too often in the spring. It is trying to get established and vigorous cleaning can hinder this. Clean it only as needed and maybe use pond water in a bucket to slosh the filter foam or whatever around in. Don’t go crazy blasting it with a hose and banging it on the concrete. Clean it gently, not worrying if you leave up to 20% of the “dirt” in it. It has to get established If you have a two-part foam prefilter and no other filter clean only the top filter with hose water. The chlorine from your hose can kill much of the “good” bacteria in the filter media. The foam roll under your top foam is your “bio-filter”. You should clean the top often enough so the bottom doesn’t get dirty. If it does, use pond water in a bucket and gently as possible clean it. Focus on getting most of the visible, loose debris off. If you have bio-balls in your lower filter section clean them the same way. If you have an external filter clean the foam and don’t bother the bio-balls, rings, ribbon, whatever you have as a bio-media. The goal is to let the foam trap the solids and clean it before it starts to fail and gets to the bio-media. If your filter has sediment in the bottom, and it usually does, it would be nice to remove it. DO NOT SPRAY YOUR FILTER WITH A HOSE. Remove the foam and spray it with a hose. Remove the bio media and place it in the pond or a container of pond water. Next, gently rinse out your filter container with POND WATER, tip it over to flush it, and put the bio media and foam back.