I’ve been waiting for the rains to fill up the pond. It still has about 20cm left to go, but it has rained pretty hard about once a week or once every two weeks recently. The next milestone is for the water to cover all of the sand. It is now within a few centimeters of getting to that level:

For comparison, you can look back at pictures of the sand as recently as early July where the sand was still mostly exposed.

The retaining walls that hold back the plants are now completely submerged, so we just need to let the plants grow out a bit and maybe add a few more lily pads and the wetland biofilter will be complete both functionally and aesthetically.