Holly
How have you been? Why do I think you are zone 6? We salt the pond so the fish will go into the winter with a nice slime coat. We used to have problems with fish health at start up in the spring until we started salting the pond. Knock wood, every year we have salted the pond, the fish have come through the winter quite healthy. Then the salt levels are brought back down to 0 in the spring with the water exchanges.
I cut back my bogs and the waterlilies are already in the bottom of the pond. The one time we tried the tropical waterlilies, the fish seemed to think it was some type of delicacy and ate the plant down to roots.
