DIY Pond Cover For Winter

How do you winterize a backyard goldfish pond? Well for us, it's easy.

We don't do much more than add a DIY screened cover.

It's simple to construct and inexpensive if you use old materials. Here are the DIY plans.


Would you be surprised if I told you that cottage living was never really in my plans?

Probably not.

I mean how many little girls run around saying, When I grow up, I want to live in the smallest house I can find...

Not many. Including me. 

And yet that's exactly what happened.

A year after we were married, on my birthday, as a matter of fact, we made an offer on the teeniest two bedroom cottage located on a 40 x100 lot of land. And boom.

I became that little girl. 

Of course, after seven years, one cat and two children later, we decided it was time to find a slightly larger cottage.

It wasn't the walls that began to close in on our 900 square foot abode, but rather the fence. 

So when this house and its quarter acre showed up for sale, we jumped on it. 

The house was lovely, but the yard...so much space. We had room for a pool, a playground, a painted patio and a pond. An actual pond.


In my cottage style garden.

It was like a dream.

In reality, it was a Kmart special, a black tub with a pump, that my husband lowered into a hole he dug in the ground. Then we landscaped around it, bought plants and a bag full of fifteen cent feeder fish from the pet store.

They brought so much life into our yard, we all just adored them.

From April until October we named them, admired them, fed them and protected them from hungry visitors by placing floating plants in the water.

Unfortunately, when winter rolled around, the plants died and the fish were exposed to predators, falling leaves that would rot in the pond and snow.

None of those were good for our swarm of swimmers.

So Why Don't We Bring Them Inside?

Well, honestly, if we only had a two or three, maybe we would. 

However, bringing 20- 30 big fish inside for the winter would require a very, very large tank. 

Goldfish are messy. Even with a filter, we'd need to clean it out and change the water often to keep everyone healthy. 

Tank life is much different that pond life...between the shock of being moved and the chemicals required to ward off disease and purify the water, it'd be a massive undertaking.

Keeping them in familiar surroundings all year is a much better solution. For everyone. 

So what do we do to take care of them in winter in a rough climate?

That is a question I get asked a lot.  

And the simple answer is...not much, beside cover them. 

At the end of each October, my husband places a screened frame cover he built over the top of the pond and problem solved.


It keeps the fish safe from any animals that try to show up for a buffet and it keeps heavy snow and leafy debris out.

We've been doing it for years now and those tiny feeder fish are bigger than my hand at this point. 

Hidden in their little lagoon during the cold months, they eat the algae off the sides of the pond and, during the really cold months, chill out (no pun intended) under a block of ice. 

A lot of people use a pond de-icer or a pond heater or chemicals. We do not. The fish manage to adjust to the water temp as it slowly cools over the course of several weeks. 

As long as there is unfrozen water for them to swim in, and there always is, even in our rather shallow pond, they're good. 

When the spring rolls around again, we pop the cover off and start feeding them again. 

How awesome is that?

Here's how he built it.

How To Build A DIY Pond Cover For Winter

His cover was constructed with a combo of store bought and curbside finds.

The frame itself is built from 2x4's. He bought enough wood to create a rectangle frame, large enough to cover the entire pond.


Then he screwed it all together.


Next, he took old window screens that he found at the curb and mounted them on the frame.


He screwed directly into the screen frame. The screens he found were a great size, so he built the frame to fit them perfectly.

However, you can overlap smaller screens to fill the frame space, if necessary.


He also could've used screening, purchased at the store, like we did for our covered porch, and you can too, but the screens were free and very stable.