Green water worried me more than it should have in the first spring. The plain advice on Living Water Gardens settled me down, because most of it came back to doing less rather than more. Clear water, it turns out, is mostly a matter of leaving things alone at the right moment.

Plants do the heavy lifting. Submerged oxygenators, marginal plants around the edge, something floating to shade the surface. I stuffed the margins more than looked tidy and the water cleared within a season. Plants take up what the algae would otherwise live on.

If you keep fish, feed them less than you think. Uneaten food sinks, rots, and feeds the algae you are trying to starve. Mine get a small pinch and clear it in minutes. On warm days they get a little more, and if the water ever clouds up I skip a day entirely.

Leaves are the other thing. A few in the pond do no harm. A blanket of them in November does. I go out with a net on a long handle every weekend through autumn and take out what has blown in. A few minutes of work, and the bottom stays clean.

Spring is where I used to panic. The water goes green and cloudy as the light comes back, and it looks like something has gone badly wrong. It has not. The plants are only starting. Give it a few weeks before you buy anything in a bottle, because most of those fixes treat the symptom and not the cause.

A small pump helps more than I expected. Nothing grand, just something to keep the water moving and the surface from going stale. I clean the sponge every couple of weeks, which takes no time at all, and I turn it off in the worst of winter when nothing is growing anyway.