permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

<< Speaking of pulling reeds...
I've got a shallow pond built by a previous owner that is full of pickeral 
weeds, which are very beautiful and the flowers are supossedly edible 
(although 
I haven't tried yet); however, they have nearly spread completely over the 
whole pond in the last 2 or 3 years. I've decided to deal with it this year 
but 
I'm dreading the job of wading in there and pulling up a big mat of biomass, 
I'm envisioning that it will be like trying to pull wire mesh out of 
concrete. 
There will be tremendous turbulence as well. Any advice? >>

Gene--  Have you given it a try? Your pond probably has a very mucky bottom, 
and the weeds should pull out of the muck readily. If the whole mass has a 
tendency to all come up at once, go in with some shears and shear off a hunk 
at a 
time.

I'm guessing that besides having to get rid of the excess weeds, you also 
should muck out the bottom. Both weeds and muck are an excellent garden soil 
amendment, and a decent sized pond is a fine and constant source of the black 
gooky stuff. This should be a once a year job, if you want to harvest the 
stuff 
for your veggies and keep the pond clean for your fish. And I would always 
leave 
some weeds so they grow back. 

What kinds of fish are you encouraging in the pond, that you don't want 
excessive weeds in it? Carp are awfully hardy, and don't mind extreme 
conditions. 
But if you are meticulous and pull up every weed and muck out every basketful 
of muck, you will have to feed them fish food for a while until the place 
gets 
a little dirty again.

In my experience, the only adverse kind of plant growth in terms of oxygen 
deprivation is algae. By the time you see algae appear, it's really time to 
do 
some cleaning. Chest high waders are a good gear to wear for the job, which 
is 
not necessarily fun.

And without weeds to grow in it, what is the biological function of your fish 
poop-- other than just to accumulate and gook things up?

What's your object with the pond?

Michael