3. Your Pond is getting overgrown with weed.
Too much weed in your pond can be a serious problem. It can trap and kill fish and deprive them of the necessary space they need for living. Plus it can cut out light to other smaller plants causing them to die.
A common type of weed that can grow out of control is blanket weed. In small amounts, it can actually be beneficial in that it is an oxygenator, plus due to its soft stringy nature it can be a good food for small fish. However, in excess, blanket weed can take over your pond quickly, using up all the nutrients in the water and creating an unsightly green slime-like mass over the water. It is in fact an algae, and as such is can reproduce very quickly in bright sunlight and in a nutrient-rich pond.
One solution to controlling the weed growth is to shade your pond slightly. If it's in direct sunlight, you may wish to consider growing trees or bushes around the pond edges, or maybe even rig up some sort of pagoda. You can also reduce the nutrients causing so much weed growth. Be careful that no fertilisers you use in the garden are leeching into the pond. Also get a water testing kit to check that nitrate and phosphate levels in the pond aren't too high. If they are, you can use a nutrient-removing solution.
For specifically removing blanket weed, you could use an algicide. However, it is not advised to use this if you have any other plant life in the pond. It shouldn't affect fish, so if you've just got blanket weed and no other plants that you're worried about, then it might be worth giving this a whirl.
Alternatively, as with all weed, rather than taking drastic action you can regularly work at reducing the amount of weed and keeping it under control. This is a worthwhile job - general pond tending should be encouraged anyway, and if you keep a regular eye on the plant life then it should never grow to be a big problem.
|
