Advice for burning/clearing cattails

[Creamer]

Thanks! That will scare you. We had our dogs go through our ice one time about 50' off shore. It took us a while to get to them and one really never did fully recover - she had health problems after that episode that she never did before.

 

[southpaw2017]

Twelve years ago our 14 acre farm pond went dry because of a hole in the spillway under the dam. Once the spillway was repaired it took another summer and a tropical storm to fill the pond back with water. The cattails had completely covered one third of the pond. We started spraying Roundup with a 15 gal. battery powered sprayer. Every two weeks we would go out and spray. By the end of the summer we had the pond completely clear of cattails and other weeds. There were still dead canes, but every time any green blades appeared we would spray them. We have in the past burned the cattails, but they came back greener and thicker after the burning. With generic Roundup, we have completely eliminated the cattails. We are having issues with underwater weeds that the Roundup will not kill. I had people telling me I was destroying the frog population and I may have. However the frogs seem to be doing fine now. The fish are also doing well.

 

[Eteda]

you might check with your local county agent. they have all kinds of free advise and knowledge. sometimes they will come out and look at the problem. they can also help you send off soil samples and plant samples pretty cheep. some peeps say to either fertilize or lime to darken the water so the weeds cant get sunlight in which to manufacture food. I'm not sure it will help around shallow edges though. but your local fish hatchery may have a carp called a white emure (spl) that will eat the weeds and grass. I think they put all the same sex in a pond so they cannot reproduce. they get 3 feet long but are just a big plant eating fish in the gold fish family. the usta scare the ^%&* out of me when I was a kid. If you are really quite and still they will come right up to the edge to eat the plants and you can see their scales they are so big. We caught one every now and then when fishing when they were small. they were about a foot long when they bought them to put them in the pond.