10. Your pond is filling up with leaves
The short term solution to preventing leaf matter gathering in your pond is to install some lightweight pond netting to catch the leaves or other foliage as they fall. The advantage of this is that this is often a seasonal problem, so, although it may be annoyance to have to use netting, the problem should only be short term. With modern lightweight netting, the whole net can easily be removed, the leaves emptied and then replaced. This should only be necessary every few days.
The other advantage of using netting is that it can also help deter predators such as herons or cats from helping themselves to your fish.
You might find yourself with a more major long-term leaf problem that pond netting does not sufficiently solve. For example, if you have built your pond too close to trees, or if trees that were previously not a problem have grown to such a size that they are now constantly dropping leaves into your pond.
In such a case you have a few options: 1) Where necessary, consider employing a tree surgeon to dramatically reduce the size of the tree(s) that may be causing the problem. 2) Rather than using netting directly over the pond, consider installing netting around the trunk of the tree that's dropping the leaves to catch the leaves at source. 3) If the situation's really bad, you might need to consider removing any trees that are causing the problem or 4) moving the pond itself (though admittedly this isn't necessarily a very practical problem).
Much better is not to build a pond too near any trees or to grow any trees too near a pond!
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