Water Weed Control

I hope that you have noticed throughout the year, as you were playing golf, the conditions of the ponds.  In years past the ponds have been horrendous.  This year they have been much better.  We have suffered through a couple different aquatic weeds: algae, primrose, coontail, duckweed.  The algae was the thick green mat that used to completely cover the surface of #'s 11, 12, and 3/4 of #18 ponds. 

Primrose is a vascular surface plant that grows from the shore line and produces a yellow flower.  You can seen in the picture to the right the red stem and broad leaf.

Coontail is a vascular subsurface weed.  You can see in the picture to the right the very tops of the plant protruding from the water.

Duckweed (pictured left) is a vascular floating weed, lime green in color and about the size of a sharpie point.  This picture is not from our course but is an accurate representation of the plant.

Our biggest problem has been the algae(pictured left).  We seem to have beaten the algae this year.  We have tried all kinds of things in the past to kill it with no real success.  We tried copper sulfates, pond dyes, herbicides (which I do not like spraying into ponds), fountains, sonic pulse emitters,and organic products.  None of them were successful.  Than last year I started reading up on Tilapia.  They are not built to live in our climate, but they are built to eat algae.  I was not sure on the legality of using these fish to clean up our ponds because in all likely hood they will die off in the cold weather.  So I contacted a regional company "Aqua Services"  and spoke with Troy Goldsby.  He has been using Tilapia for a few years now maintaining ponds to acceptable levels.  I pulled the trigger on it this spring and bought abunch of them, I think 30-40lbs of them. 

This is what our pond on #18 used to look like.

This is what our Pond on #18 Looked Like at peak season this season.