Pond Boss Forums AQUATIC VEGETATION Balance of plants in the environment first cattails...

Pond is 1 yr old, 1 acre, 8 ft deep, LMB/BG pond in southern oklahoma. Just found 2-3 patches of 5-8 sprouts of 12" tall cattails. I'm considering letting 2 patches develop and removing the others. I've got pondweed and sedges around the edge started and other than some pickerel, I'm letting the edges grow up in grasses/sedges/"weeds". Will I regret keeping some of these? I'd be okay with 20-30 ft patches but I don't want 50% of my shoreline ringed with cattails. Other than mowing/weed-eating occas, I don't want a pond that I need to aggressively manage. Thanks for any advice!

Make sure it’s not the plant that resembles cattails (doesn’t have the head) cause that stuff is almost impossible to rid of ..... not sure about cattails but I would control early if it were me

I just spent the last week physically removing a 30 foot long patch of long established cattails from my pond. In Pennsylvania we are not allowed to use a machine to do this so it requires manual pulling.

Having experienced what I have with cattails, I would be literally nipping it in the bud now!

+1 in that

FWIW.....

I had a patch in one spot at the ponds edge for 4 years before my they got killed when my grass leaser sprayed the field. A year later after disappearing they have re-emerged on the opposite bank.

I had very good luck getting rid of a large patch of cattails along one edge of my pond using pond approved glyphosate. They had grown rapidly over a couple of years and I was concerned they may be hard to get rid of but I sprayed them in late summer /early fall just when they were showing signs of turning brown. That was theee years ago. It totally eliminated them and only now am I seeing a few sprouts along the edge. I’m going to allow a small strip along one edge, but will spray other outcroppings. I think the key is spraying when the plant is drawing nutrients down into the tubers late in the summer.

The advantage of complete removal of the plant and the tubers has the advantage of removing all of the biomass from the pond rather than allowing it to slowly decompose over time adding nutrients and consuming the oxygen. Having pulled cattails by hand I can assure you there is more of them than meets the eye and that is what the chemicals do not remove.

I have a couple 15-20’ long patches I control with aquatic glyphosate. I like em.

I keep natural edges on my 3 ponds and half dozen wetlands, but willows and cattails are not welcome. Willows get glyphosate and cattails get pulled. There are less invasive options. Instead of cattails, giant burreed works better for me.

The cattails were pretty easy to get rid of, I just pulled them up when I first saw about 10 of them start up. But the willows are much more invasive and hard to get rid of. How do you spray, what do you spray to get rid of them? Mechanical cutting and pulling is a never ending battle around my pond.

During the late summer, wiping them with glyphosate is quite effective. The technique my wife uses is "the glove of death".

https://www.pennlive.com/gardening/2010/06/glove_of_death.html

Also search

https://www.invasive.org/gist/products/library/herbupkeep.pdf

for "glove of death"

Rah, I have considered using the glove of death but I don't like the idea of keeping my hands saturated in Gly. Roundup or Rodeo. Also thought of using a saturated mop. We have been cutting them down and applying some Gly to the stump but it is to slow of a process with all the willows that I have. And when the willows get in the 5 to 7' tall range they seem to be much harder to kill if we don't cut and spray the stump.

Tracy, wear a good pair of rubber gloves under the saturated gloves and wear a breathing mask.

I may be wrong, but I believe nitrile rubber is best. When I do cut-stump treatment away from water, I use Tordon.

I just treated some. Used glyphosate on cattails and torodon on willows.

In my case my ponds were very low so the plants/trees were a foot or so up the bank. I just had rubber boots on and walked right along the water edge and with a little quart hand pump spray bottle sprayed from the pond side out towards the bank. Did not get any spray on the water at all.

I've also done this when the water was at normal levels but I use a stick or hooked stick or something to bend the plants toward the bank, then again I spray from the water side toward the bank.

I'm not talking about big patches of the stuff but just scattered sprouts and start up patches along waters edge.

I know "wiping" works well too though. Back in the days before Roundup ready beans farmers used "rope wick" applicators that wiped straight Roundup (glyphosate) on the weeds standing above the non Roundup bean crop by "wiping" the tops of the weeds.

For Tordon, look up "buckthorn blaster".

The buckthorn blaster looks like a nice tool for applications where we want a lot of control to eliminate overspray.

As for Tordon, I have found that using a glass cleaner spray bottle saves a lot of overages compared to using the pull-top squirt bottle that it comes in. I bet I can get bottle to last 4 times as long and it still has a 100% kill rate.

Willows are very invasive, they seem to come back as soon as you cut them down. I found them to be harder to control over cattails. I need to declare war on them!