Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat Help

Are you sure it's duckweed and not watermeal? They're similar, but WM is much, much smaller - kind of like grains of cornmeal. I don't know too much about duckweed, but watermeal, along with just about every other aquatic plant in the pond, would likely be eliminated with a fluoridone based product like Whitecap or the others that use it as the active ingredient. If done early enough in the season and in the right dosage amounts to maintain the required ppm concentration, fluoridone will pretty readily keep things under control for several months.

Grass carp will not eat either DW or WM, so don't waste resources trying that approach. Both are target food sources for tilapia, but tilapia are likely only 5 - 6 month fish in your area as most strains will die off around 55 degrees or so. Blue tilapia are a bit more cold hardy and can survive down to around 45 degrees. They all reproduce like crazy, providing a great food source for the young fish and as they slow down as the temps drop, the larger ones become food for your big predators in the pond. The right concentration of tilapia in terms of pounds per acre could potentially have a solid impact on the surface vegetation while also adding to your food chain, but tilapia will be an annual stocking in order to maintain their impact.