Pond Boss Forums AQUATIC VEGETATION Controlling unwanted plants FA from top to bottom

Knobber, sorry to see your FA problem. They are thorny issues for sure.

I had a constant raking plan going but it sent me to the physical therapist more than once. I paid neighbor kids to rake and they soon found that I didn't pay them enough (apparently) for the work expected as soon there was no more neighbor boys willing to rake.

But I knew that if I hauled out 3-4 trailer loads of heavy algae mats that this was 500 or more pounds of nutrients that would never be back in the water column or on the bottom of the pond. It seemed like i could take out 500 pounds a year easily...

Then one year in the fall I got a small plastic boat and a 6hp 2 stroke outboard and I had my son run the outboard and I stood in the shallows in front of the boat. He would gun the motor and swing the tiller from side to side while the boat tried to push me over. This way we could sweep a very powerful water jet back and forth and really peel off a bunch of the muck that was in the shallows. We created billows of muck all the way around. This isn't ideal as it pushes the nutrients into the deep which ideally I would like it out of the pond. But it did help clean up the shallows.

That winter we had FA on the UNDERSIDE of the ice. Come spring there was algae growing in the shallows all over even in cold water. That season we had an explosion of FA which I believe was simply due to dredging tons of nutrients out of the bottom and suspending them back up in the water.

We raked and raked and raked some more and after that year we have had 2-3 years of very little FA at all.

You may have to play through this bumper crop of nutrients and find a mechanical removal tool. Some on the forum have rigged a long pole and a crude rake like drag on a front end loader to allow them to drive out and pull the algae back in. Others have dragged a mattress or some other type of drag through the shallows to pull it out.

Tilapia can help but in your size pond you would need a lot as in our short growing season only the larger stocked Tilapia will eat the algae and you will not have time for TP to have babies and for the babies to grow up large enough to help eat the algage.

But yes, even with lots of chemicals killing the algae you have hundreds and hundreds of pounds of organic material that still is best moved out of the pond.