COMPLETE GUIDE For Keeping Your Patio Fish Pond ALIVE and HEALTHY!

It's springtime, which means it's about to be pond season. And you probably clicked on this video because you're thinking about setting up a really cool little patio pond. So I'm going to give you today all of my knowledge that I have of doing this for the last like eight years. This video should answer basically every single question you could ever possibly have about setting up a small pond or best fish, best plants, mosquitoes, raccoons. Where do you put your pond? What if it's too cold? What do you do in the winter? All of that. This video will not be how to actually physically set up a pond. I have a ton of other videos. I've done it a million times and we're about to do that a bunch here on the channel. So I should also say that this is not a video about big full size standard normal pond. This is all relevant to the small patio pond style container pond world. Okay. All right. All right, let's begin with probably the most important part of this whole process and that is selecting your container for your small pond. This, you have an infinite amount of choices. The only thing that's going to slow you down here is your own creativity. So what I like to do is go for the less expensive pots that are just made out of plastic. The plastic's not going to hurt anything and a lot of them are in a pretty good size. So they're going to range from like 10 gallons to 20 gallons for a lot of them and they're probably going to be under definitely under 30 bucks. I like to try and find ones that look good on the outside. They have some kind of an aesthetic that will match where I'm going to put it and that also don't have a hole in the bottom. The pot that you really like might have a hole. It's just an extra step. You put a rock silicone around it and there's a bunch of different ways that you can seal this thing up. So it'll hold water. I also really recommend that you try and stay away from pots that are too skinny and tall. Like a lot of them might be like that. It's just going to make it harder for you to have room to put in your pond plants later on. So try and find something that is like a happy medium of has enough space at the top. Like all of this will kind of make sense a little bit later. Um, and something that also isn't too shallow because depending on where you put it, the more shallow your water is, the more subject it's going to be to temperature fluctuations, which we'll also talk about. Once you got your pot selected, now you need to figure out where you're going to put this thing. And I think this is honestly the most important piece of the whole puzzle. It's kind of also the most boring. Um, but it'll make sense. You definitely want your patio pond to be in a spot where you're going to see it. So this depends largely on how like your backyard or your front porch or wherever you're going to put this thing is set up. If you live in an apartment and you have a small deck, you can still totally do a patio pond. You're just going to have to be more conscious of the space, but put this thing somewhere where you know you can enjoy it and that you don't have to go out of your way to look at it. It's, I think that's an important part, at least for me. The second part of this whole thing is knowing where the sun is relative to your pond, because the sun obviously is the biggest influence on the whole system. If I were you, I would try and keep this thing as mostly in the shade as possible. You don't need a ton of light. Indirect sunlight is going to be able to grow most of the plants you want and illuminate the pond just fine. If your pond ends up sitting somewhere where it's in direct sunlight from 9am to 7pm, then you're probably going to have a problem. This can be a little tricky for some people, but I think most of us that are going to be pretty close to the house, which is, I mean that house is going to provide a decent amount of shade for at least part of the day. Likewise with the apartment example, I mean if it's on your apartment's deck, then you're probably only going to be getting what, like max six hours of light before that sun flips over. But if it's gotta be in a spot where you think it might be getting too much sunlight, I don't have the exact breakdown of like how many hours is too much or too little. I don't think too little is even a thing, but if you're worried about it, you can also get more creative with the shading. Maybe you can put some terrestrial plants in some planters next to it, kind of like I have with my pond here. Or if you're in an apartment on your deck, maybe you have a shade that's already there that you can pull down, something like that. Or you have a gazebo nearby, maybe that you can use as a diffuse sun reflector. What's the word I'm looking for? Uh, I don't know, but just try and keep the thing as mostly in the shade as possible. I don't even think you're going to have an issue if your pond is completely in the shade for most of the day. If it gets direct sunlight for like an hour, it's totally fine. You're going to be good. The other part of this equation though, that does get a little tricky is where you live. So summertime, I think most of us, you know, we experience pretty hot weather, at least here in the U S I don't know. Maybe, you know, if you live in Siberia or the North pole or you might be out of luck, patio pond season might be a shorter window for you, but I think you could totally still do it. Obviously things are going to be different for you. If you live in like South Florida, then for somebody like me that lives kind of like in the middle of the West coast of the United States, maybe a little bit higher. Um, but yeah, I don't think it really matters. I don't know if zones are a relative thing. I don't know what zone I live in and I, I don't know what any of the zones are. I wouldn't get hung up on that. I would just know that if you live somewhere closer to the North pole or the South pole, you're probably going to have to wait a little bit later in the season to start. And then you're going to have to be done with your pond or at least winterize it and start getting ready about the other things you have to think about a little sooner. On the flip side of that, if you live like in Arizona, I know it's really hot. I get a lot of comments saying it's just way too hot to do this period. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you might be a little wrong. I think there's always ways to work around this thing. The complete and total shade thing I think is something you should definitely do. If it's, if it's going to be super hot for you, this summer, like over a hundred degrees for multiple, multiple weeks out of the year, then definitely think about doing a deeper pond, bigger pond. That way the water's cooler down at the bottom for the fish. They can self regulate their temperature a little bit better and just keeping your pond in basically full shade or building something to create that full shade. That's totally going to save you also throw in an air stone. If you're worried about the oxygen diffusion in the water, because it's so hot, remember that's not going to be as good. The warmer the water temp is, all of these little things can help you have a pond. Even if the surface temp is reading like over a hundred degrees, the type of fish that you decide to use in your little pond is also relative to really hot temperatures and really cold temperatures. And we'll get to that soon. That might be it for containers and locations. Sorry we had to spend so long on the location of the pond, but it is really important. I think it's one of the most important aspects of this whole thing. Now let's chat about the pond plants. Okay? You have an infinite amount of choices when it comes to pond plants. You are sort of limited to the availability of what your local garden center has. Maybe there's a really good place that you can get them online. I'm just unaware of it. I think, you know, like eBay, there might be a way to get some smaller, like some cuttings of some different plants. You're going to have to do a little bit more research on that because I've always stuck to what I've had at my local garden centers and I'm subject to the availability and the time that they get them in. But I've had a lot of different pond plants over the years in small ponds in kind of medium sized ponds. And I think what I want to do for this video is just break it down, make it really simple for you. And especially for somebody who's using like a 10, 20, 30 gallon container. So stick to the example of this pond. It has two pond plants in it and it has some aquarium plants that we'll touch on in a sec. I think what makes a patio pond look really good is two dimensions. So you have one aspect where there's some verticality in that case, that's just going to be this Iris plant that we have. I don't know specifically what type of Iris it is. Obviously one that's meant to be grown in water full time. You're going to find these at pretty much any garden center that has a little pond section during the spring and summertime. So you should be good there. I mean it's, it's going to survive for forever. Like pretty much the two plants that we have in this pond got completely frozen solid. We didn't have any fish in the pond. Don't worry. But these plants were in just a cube of ice when it was like 15 degrees for a week this winter. So obviously bouncing back here in the summer bulletproof plants. The other plant is I'm pretty sure it's just standard creeping Jenny that you can literally find in soil at anywhere like home Depot, Lowe's, any garden center, anywhere creeping Jenny is tight because it just sort of grows along the side. It'll drape over the edge of the pond and it'll give you that sort of other dimension of plant growth that you can see. Just sort of chills over the water. A lot of it will get out of control and it isn't an aggressive grower, so it'll fill in space. And I just think these two plants, I mean that's all I need for this pond. If you can imagine if we had a third plant in here or a fourth plant, then there wouldn't be that much more room in the container for fish. Just having these two pots in here, I it gives me room down at the substrate. We just have some sand in here for me to put in some dwarf sag. So we're starting to get into the aquarium world a little bit. Now dwarf sag is a really good plant to put down at the bottom of your pond. It's going to grow in low light. It's going to grow in highlight if it's getting a lot of direct sunlight. Totally cool. It's not going to completely melt off on you. It might a little bit in the early stages, but it's a really hardy plant. It's really perfect for this situation. And I mean, besides it being one of my favorite aquarium plants, it's also one of my favorite aquarium pond plants. I know I'm not giving you a ton of variety with the pond plants in this video, but I would say, you know, you can try things like another popular one is the papyrus plant. So it's going to be this kind of tall skinny looking stem with a cool frond. I guess you'd say up at the top, I've done those a bunch of times. There's also like, there's some big ones that you can find, but a lot of them are just that they, they get really big. And so they also haven't been as hardy for me, although they will survive most winters. I think if you're just dealing with like a little 10 gallon pond, you definitely don't want a huge like four foot papyrus growing out of the top of it. Or I mean, maybe you do like that's up to you. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, you might have this question when you get a pond plant from a nursery, it's just going to come in like a solid pot with just holes on the bottom. You don't need to replant it. You can leave whatever type of kind of weird clay soil stuff they have in there. I like to just take these pots and stab them with a really small knife. I think you probably don't have to do that. I haven't done that in the past. Everything's just fine, but just to create a little bit more water flow. I like to do that. If you do want to get a little bit more involved, you can always pick up like some mesh pots from somewhere that are meant for aquatic plants. You can then put in any kind of media or substrate, right? That you want. I just picked up these at the garden center and I think I'm going to try putting just like random aqua soil or contra soil that I have in buckets outside this year. Cause I'm not using it for anything else. Or, or if you're looking to spend some more money, you know, you could just go and you could buy actual like aquatic plants, uh, growth media. I think it's all kind of just the same stuff. There's obviously way more plants that you could experiment with and try that I didn't mention. Um, but I think that's probably good for that section. I think we gotta, we gotta talk about the fish now cause you're probably most interested in that when it comes to small fish for small patio ponds. You have a lot of choices. If you live in Hawaii, if you're fortunate enough to live in such an amazing, beautiful place that has such stable temperature year round, you can probably put whatever you want from the aquarium world in a small pond, right? At least you're just dictated by size, not really the environment or the temperature. But for the vast majority of us, we have some decisions to make and it's all going to depend on the climate that our patio ponds are in. During the summertime when it's really warm, you can kind of get away. You have more flexibility, right? You can get away with more. I've put like even cherry barbs in a pond where I know it's not going to get too cold at night. But really when it comes to fish, you have a limited selection. Just kind of like you have a limited selection with most Koi ponds, right? You got Koi and you got goldfish, carp, whatever. In mini pond world for the vast majority of us in sort of like a moderate climate, I think the best choice is, I promise this isn't a rice fish video, but it is, it is the rice fish. I think for most of us, they're going to be just fine in the summertime, depending on what your winter climate is like. The overwintering process may or may not work. So for me, like just this last winter, it froze over. It was like 15 degrees for almost a week. My rice fish survived frozen water on top. I think that's, that's pretty common. If your entire container is definitely going to freeze over and you know this about where you live, then you're going to need to do some extra steps to prevent that from happening. If I was a part of the Gen Z generation, I would say that rice fish are the Sigmas of small pond world and they are definitely not from Ohio, but I'm not. So I won't say that I have picked on Minnesota before. Um, a lot. I don't know why even, but even the glorious rice fish, which is extremely cold tolerant and heat tolerant is not going to do well in a Minnesota winter. And you're going to have to either put your pond in the garage or you're going to need to pull your fish probably in mid fall, maybe sooner because even the amazing, glorious, wonderful rice fish will not survive being completely frozen solid in an ice cube. But this is not a rice fish video. It's not a rice fish video. So let's move on. Let's go to another pick. One of my other favorites is the golden white cloud minnow. I like this fish because you can easily see it in the water column compared to most other minnows that don't have a lot of color. They're kind of more difficult to see, but the golden white cloud minnows, they really pop and you can see them from a mile away. They're awesome. They're not going to be as cold tolerant as the rice fish. They're not, they're probably not going to be as heat tolerant either, but they're pretty, they do pretty well even in colder water. I haven't pulled mine outside yet because despite the fact that we're having like random days in the seventies that are full of sun and no rain or clouds, we can still get down to even like the upper thirties at night. So while I kind of wait out this 30 degree split in temperature, we're not going to be pulling the minnows out, even though I think they could probably handle it for a little while. Another really good pond fish is going to be the mosquito fish. So basically the guppies ugly cousin, another cold tolerant fish that seems to do pretty well. I don't have really any experience with them, but hopefully I will this year. Another one that we're going to also get some experience with is the rainbow shiner. So another fish that is supposedly supposed to have like the best colors ever. They're also going to be a pretty good choice for, you know, like a 15, 20 ish, 20, 30 gallon tank pond. Those are the four fish that really stand out in my mind as like the best choice for a small pond. Obviously if you're dealing with a big stock tub, something that's 50, 60, 80, a hundred, 200. I mean if you're, if you have a big pond, you know, you can go into the goldfish world. You can go into the smaller koi fish carp world, but when it comes to the small ponds that we're talking about in today's video, you're going to probably want to go to rice fish world because rice fish are just the dopest fish. They're perfect for this setup and I think you're going to have far better success with them, especially if you're in a place where you're going to be overwintering your pond and you want to try and keep your fish in your pond year round. They don't call them the mini koi fish for nothing. They're built for this and it's not a cruel thing. It's part of how they have such good longevity. It's part of just their nature to be cold. They want to go through a cold season where they're not eating for five, six months so that way they can just rebound and be so much more healthy and vibrant, have better breeding in the summertime. So if your climate allows it and you have the attention to detail, you have the want to be involved throughout the whole year, then I think you can't go wrong with rice fish. We unfortunately don't have a ton of really cool ones in the U S but there are a handful that are pretty interesting and I think you're going to enjoy. So like for me, I got the platinums there. There's really cool white color. You can see them from a mile away. You got the midnight black ones. That's another common, the Yoki, he, the all orange rice fish are kind of not the easiest fish to find and they tend to be a little bit more expensive I think because they are not such a popular fish yet. So if your local fish store doesn't have them and let me premise this with, I don't have any sort of financial affiliation with any of these companies. I might be friends with a couple of the dudes that personally, you know, they have small businesses and they sell them, but like Aquahuna I've gotten rice fish from them before. I know that like aquatic arts is another place that sells them online. I'm sure there's some other online fish stores where you can get these, but those are just the two that are like they sit in my brain. These fish are going to be not as hardy as the ones that you get from a hobbyist or somebody that actually keeps them outside year round. And so for that I got a couple of choices. These are my buddies. But again, no like affiliate or anything. I'm just, I'm giving you the sauce right now. You got Daku aquatics dude from South Florida sells a bunch of fish and plants online. Um, he, you know, keep in mind that's a South Floridian rice fish. So I'm not sure how cold those winters are, but I think they do get a little chilly. I'm sure they're going to be pretty robust fish. And then my dude Jackson at the Medaka layer, you're going to be able to get some more rarer varieties from him and he's from the bay. So those winters do get a little bit of chilly. I have a few of his fish. We're going to be keeping them outside year round starting this spring. Um, and you're going to be able to get a little bit more variety from him. Just like, I guess some rarer ones just, but just be prepared to spend a little bit of coin on your rice fish. They aren't the cheapest thing in the world, but they're not that expensive. I mean, from Aquahuna, you might be able to get them for, I think four, four, five, six bucks a fish. Is that expensive for, I mean, I just love price fish so much. I don't, I don't really care how much they cost, but yeah, enough about the fish world. I know it's not very many choices, but, uh, those are, I think going to be your best bets when it comes to fish for your small pond. Look at that. Change your scenery. All right. So before we move into like the more of the FAQ, the, all the little random questions that I'll just kind of bang out here, figured the last main theme that should be talked about are, it's kind of a two pronged thing, but it's basically mosquitoes and pond security. They're kind of lumped into one, but mosquitoes, I think deserves its own special thing. So a comment I've seen a million times. What about the mosquitoes? I think everybody has to deal with some level of mosquitoes where I live. There are mosquitoes. I think mosquitoes are pretty much everywhere, but we don't seem to have a ton of them, at least relative to what I've heard other people say. So if you live somewhere where there's a metric truckload of mosquitoes and a few fish in a pond, aren't going to be able to handle it. I'm sure that's a thing that is real, at least for me with the amount of fish that I have in my ponds, which isn't a lot. Sometimes it's only like five or six fish. I don't seem to have any issue with mosquito larvae hatching. I don't know if it's as simple as just add more fish and then your problem will be solved. If you live in one of those places where there's an infinite amount, but all of the fish that we talked about will eat mosquito larvae. So you might see little wigglers from now and then, but you shouldn't see anything hatching at the surface. At least I don't think so based on how I've lived my life and where I live my life. So if that's something you're concerned about, maybe do a little bit more research, maybe test it out and see, but there are some other options to deal with mosquitoes. There's some fish safe things. The big one is just mosquito dunks. Chances are if you're somebody that has issues with mosquitoes, you already know about mosquito dunks, but they're fish safe. I've messed around with them a little bit in the past, basically for no research for no reason for research purposes. And they seem to work. So not going to have any issues with your plants or your fish. And I think they work pretty good. There's other little things that you can do to try and cut down on the mosquitoes. Um, I, you know, burn a citronella candle next to your pond for 24 hours a day for four months. I'm not sure. Yeah, you probably shouldn't do that, but maybe you can cover like your whole thing in a mosquito net or something. I don't know. Maybe just focus on the fish. And I think that's pretty much all you can do. The other one that I wanted to talk about is the literal arch nemesis of all of these patio ponds. And that is the raccoon. Pond security is something that is also going to be dictated by where you live and the types of weird predators that you might have in your backyard. I know that's my dude. Daku has a problem with a type of bird that lives where he lives. That type of bird doesn't live where I live. Hence it is not a problem that I have experienced, but I think most people have the raccoon experience included. I mean, I, I've dealt with raccoons before, you know, is your backyard completely fenced? Do you have deer coming into your property? I don't know if deer would actually, they might come and like drink out of your pond. They might accidentally slurp up a fish, but I don't think they're going to be rooting around in it too much. I'm trying to think if I've ever had like a squirrel problem still, I don't, I've never seen a squirrel take interest in a pond or even that many birds around where I live either. Like a blue Jay might've taken an interest in one, but I've never seen like a crow attack my pond before. Anyway, I think the most relevant pond predator to most people, maybe you yourself is that raccoon. Okay. I have had raccoon problems in the past. There's sometimes not a lot you can do. Um, I've gone as far as to create an entire like netted cage made out of PVC pipe that I put over my pond at nighttime. But that kind of sucks. Like you're going to forget to do it one time. And maybe if you got enough of a raccoon problem, that might be the one time that everything falls apart. Those raccoons will get into your pond. They'll root around, they'll get there. You know, they like to use their hands to dig for stuff. Maybe they got a, a water fetish. I don't know what's going on with raccoons, but they definitely can destroy a pond. So you need to make sure, maybe like put fence around your barbed wire if they're jumping that thing. But for real, uh, if you can try and get your pond elevated or put in a situation where a raccoon can't get to it, that's probably going to be your best bet. I know at the last place I lived at, all of my ponds were up on like the deck that the sort of the main level of the house was. And I never had a raccoon problem. They weren't scaling the deck to get up to the pond. But yeah, maybe there's some other raccoon deterrent things that I don't know about other than, you know, like trapping all the raccoons in your area. I don't have a ton of great advice for the raccoon problem. It's definitely something that, I mean, if that's your problem, that's a big one. So that might sway you into having to get more creative with your setup. Maybe it's, you know, you put your patio pond in your fence to garden or something like that. I'm not sure. Let's bust into the FAQs. I have a list for this, so I don't forget. Okay. All the important questions that I could ever possibly think of regarding the patio pond stuff. So first one is algae. So we kind of talked about it in the pond placement. Like if you really want to cut back on algae, try and keep your pond somewhere where it doesn't get that direct sunlight for too much of the day. A lot of my ponds, they get five hours of a direct beam or probably even less than that. Just because of, you know, I don't know. The, my example here is like, it's April, but the earth is going to like tilt more. So the sun is probably going to hit it for longer, maybe shorter. I don't know. I'm not an astronomer. Okay. So I'm not really sure, but yeah, just keep that direct sunlight to a minimum. Or, you know, if you're having issues, like just go straight into the shade. This is going to help prevent you from having to look at something that has a horrible, crazy algae problem. And it's also going to prevent you from like having to buy a bunch of chemicals and do weird stuff to prevent that algae or try and kill it. Prevention is key when it comes to the algae situation. So try that. Also like just more pond plants, more aquarium plants, the more plants that you can put in your pond and still have it be something that looks good and works for you and your fish is just going to make it that much easier. Now, algae problems can still happen even if you put a bunch of plants in, like if it's getting just way too much direct sunlight, but there's a balance here that you can find. And that finding that balance is kind of fun. It's kind of part of the whole thing. What about, what about an air stone in your pond? And I think that kind of ties in with the filtration. So do you, do you need to have filtration? Do you need an air stone? I have never intentionally put an air stone into any of my ponds. I've never felt that it's been necessary, even though sometimes at the hottest days in the summer, I clock that thing surface temp, like 95, 96 degrees. That's partly because of a couple of things. One, the type of fish we use, you know, the rice fish, they're extremely tolerant to having low dissolved oxygen in the water. That's going to be the main thing with having a hot pond. Even the golden white cloud minnows haven't seemed to, you know, they're not up at the top gassing for air. I think that's mostly because you got to remember that it's not 95 up at the top down below. It could be several degrees cooler. It might be five, six degrees cooler. And in turn, there's just going to be a little bit more oxygen down there at the bottom of the pond. That's why I think you might notice a lot of your fish go down to the bottom during the hottest parts of the day, because they're trying to stay a little cooler and they can get more air down there. Now, now if you live somewhere where it's really, really, really hot, you can't avoid the sunlight. You're worried about it. I think just throwing an air stone in is a great idea. There's battery powered air pumps nowadays that you can use. So you can get away from having to have anything plugged in like I like to do. And basically the same thing goes for filtration. Like if your pond is right next to an outlet and it's not a hassle, you can slap a little HOB on the side of it. I've done that before. Kind of that's going to provide you filtration. It's also going to help give you some water flow, which is always nice. A lot of these ponds do just fine without it though. I think because the plants are so aggressive at pulling nutrients and things out of the water that you don't really need to have a bunch of dedicated space for the nitrification process. But on some of the ponds, if you're looking for a wireless way to move water because you just want to, like I do on this pond, you can always go with the kind of unreliable way too expensive little solar pumps that you find on Amazon. I've bought like an infinite amount of these things and eventually you'll find one that just lasts for forever. So the one that you see here, I think I kind of mix matched it with a solar panel from another one, but this thing's been running for years and it's been kind of moved around to different ponds over the years. It's not on here for any other reason than me just liking it being on the pond. I don't think it really serves that much of a function here, but I think those are a good way to at least move water around, which is never a bad thing. Like I said, and that's really all we're trying to do here is just circulate the water a little bit better so that the plants can take out all the impurities and the things that we don't want to build up over time. Um, another one is rain. So I also recognize that some people live in places where it rains a lot in the summer. Maybe you live in a, in a tropical location that, that must be nice. I'm jealous. If it does rain a lot, there's a couple of things you can do. One obviously move it somewhere where it doesn't get rained on or you can even consider drilling a small hole in the side, kind of high up on the pond. I've done this a couple of times. It does work. Yeah. You do still want to kind of seal it with some type of mesh because just like when the pond gets completely full and overflows, the fish can fall out of that just as easy as a little hole in the side. But that's another way to combat the rain and not have to worry about your fish swimming out onto the concrete or wherever your pond is located. Oh man, I am definitely forgetting something. What is it? I don't know. You're going to, I mean, drop it, drop it down below. The one super obvious thing that I forgot to put in this video. Um, the last thing though that I could remember is what do you do in the winter time with your pond? Because so many people see this video or any of the pond set up videos. They see it, they see it whenever they see it. They see it in the spring, they see it in the summer. And it's like, does this, is this a thing that you just set up for a couple of months and then you get rid of and then make new every year? And so the answer to that is kind of yes, but also no. So it just depends on what the pond is to you. So for me and the rice fish, there was an opportunity to keep the fish outside and have these ponds live for you know, the year, two years, three or four years hopefully. And then some of the ponds are just not meant to do that. So it really just depends. Like the rice fish ponds, yes, the fish stayed out there, but all the plants that we put into those ponds didn't make it for one reason or the other. And then on the flip side of that, the pond that we've been looking at a lot in this video, we took the golden white cloud minnows out of there because I wasn't confident they were going to make it through the winter. Um, and then the plants all survived, even though this thing just totally got frozen over because the plants survived. And because this thing wasn't like totally destroyed, it didn't get cracked by it completely freezing. We're going to recycle it and reuse it again this summer. And we're not going to make that many changes to it. We're probably going to put the same exact fish back into it and then just run it that way. So it really just depends. It depends so much on where you live and where your pond is located. I just don't think that I can give you the most personalized answer to what you should do in the winter, but I'll try. If you had your pond out all spring and summer and things went good and your fish are happy and your plants are happy and you want to keep it going, but you know, because you live in Minnesota or Ohio or somewhere in the Midwest where you know it's going to completely freeze, you can move your pond into the garage. It might still get really cold in there, but if it's in the garage, it's definitely by some outlets. You can put a small heater in there. Or if you're more confident and you don't think it would completely freeze in your garage, maybe your garage is heated. I don't know. You could try just throwing an air stone in there so that it would prevent it from freezing, right? Like if it's going to get so cold that nothing can survive, then just pull your fish out and don't worry about it. Even the rice fish. If, if, if it's causing you stress, I don't want you to be stressed out. So just pull your fish. You can still do all these things to prevent the pond from freezing. So maybe your plants survive. Um, hopefully you have a spot that you can park it for the winter time and you can reuse it again. But if it's not, if that's not feasible for you, then just don't do it. Then yes, it is something that you will have to take down in the late fall. Hopefully the late fall, not the early fall, but you'll just have to figure out the best, the biggest time window that you can do your pond stuff and then just make sure that you do it. So you have the most time and you have the most time to enjoy your fish and watch the whole thing develop. Cause that's what it's all about. So yeah, I think that's probably everything I could think of. Hopefully I didn't forget a super obvious thing, but if I did throw it down in the comments, that's the video. That is the complete guide to patio ponds to hopefully give you the most success with whatever you decide to do this spring or summer. It's really fun. I think if you're a fish keeping person, if you love aquariums, if you've never tried the whole outdoor pond thing, you can hopefully now with some confidence go for it because it's, it's a lot of fun. It's another dimension to the hobby that I love. I love the seasonality of it. It's kind of like a breath of fresh air every springtime when it comes around. So yeah, you should definitely go for it. You should definitely go to Home Depot or Lowe's right now and get a planter pot, hit up Costco. They have some big like almost 30 gallon ones that I think are like $35. Those are a good choice. It is a rainy day and now I get to sit here and edit this hopefully not super long video. If you made it this far, you're a real one. And this definitely wasn't a rice fish video. I promise. Thanks for watching. You rock and we'll see you next week.