Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Controlling Lilly pads and Hydrilla

I have a 3 acre strip pit that is covered in lilly pads and hydrilla in approximately a 1 acre section of the pit. I don't mind some lilly pads and hydrilla growth, but it has become a lot of growth. Thus affecting the fishing and my major spawning area of the pit. My neighbor has suggested aquatic roundup. I am looking for suggestions on aquatic roundup. Which brand, the amount to use, and what time of year to use it. I would appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks.

A common good aquatic glysophate aquatic product with surfactant (sticker) is ShoreKlear-Plus (Shore-Klear Plus). They also sell one without surfactant ShoreKlear. Rural King stores have SK Plus.

The spatterdock in the middle of that old pond is actually right beside the hump but it will eventually cover the hump also.

More than you probably want to know, but the under water hump was originally a very small island (maybe 10'x20'). When cleaning out the muck in the old pond it got to the point the sides were so steep and slick from the muck I just was not making headway. So rather than trying to push the remaining muck out of the pond, I just turned around and pushed it up to the center of the pond in a high pile (to get the most deep area I could). Named it "Turtle Island. And the turtles did like. What I should have named it was "Canada Goose Island" because I had a pair every year I had to run off as they insisted to make a nest on the island. Perfect protection for them from the coyotes. But I did not want my very own flock of Canada's pooping all over everything all the time. So I raised the dam, put in an overflow pipe at a higher full pool level, and raised the water to where now the island is no longer an island but an under water hump. No more geese problems. The spatterdock had been growing on the east side of the island before raising the water level as that was the portion of the pond where I could never remove the remaining muck so the water was still fairly shallow there. The spatterdock will eventually expand in size to about double what it is now to cover what was the island and is not the hump. But the water is deep enough around that area it should not expand much more than that.

Shen I first cleaned the pond out, a small area just east of the island still held a small amount of water and was too wet for me to clean out. So that area was going to be more shallow water than the areas surrounding it. After the pond filled to the new cleaned out level, there were some very spindly spatterdock leaves that made it to the surface in that area. I thought I was going to have problems with it there. But it must have been just barely too deep because after a couple years of the spatterdock trying to leaf out from that depth, the roots must have dies because it quit trying. Since I raised the pond another 18" since then to cover the island up, that water now should be plenty deep to keep the spatterdock away for quite some time.

The area that I will eventually have to control some of it will be on the south side of the pond where there is some shallow water area. The batch that is there I will eventually have to kill out some of it as it spreads more than I like.

FireIsHot mentioned water approved surfactant was mentioned to add to the water approved glyphosate. If the label calls for it, I would definitely use it. Different mixtures of glyphosate herbicides may or may not already have surfactants included. Plants with a waxy surface surfactants can definitely aid in the chemical entering the plant thus making it more effective. Read the label and see what it recommends. That said, if I had the choice of spraying the spatterdock before it goes dormant without additional surfactant and waiting till an order came in of surfactant and taking the chance the spatterdock would have went dormant (we are right at the knifes edge of that plant shutting down for winter), I would spray it and take the chance. It is not that the glyphosate will not work without the surfactant, it is just that the surfactant breaks down the water tension so it will penetrate the waxy leaves better, making a given dosage more effective. In other words, if it calls for surfactant but you don't have any, use the highest end the legal label rate will allow to make sure you get a kill. Error on the stout side.

Another very, VERY important thing about using glyphosate products (Roundup). USE CLEAN WATER.

Glyphosate ties up rapidly with any dirt or minerals in the water. Very hard or dirty water can render roundup diminished or even ineffective (if the water is really dirty) if allowed to be in the dirty any length of time before spraying. So DO NOT USE POND WATER.

Home owners that are mixing small amounts can just make sure they use enough (make a strong enough mixture) if they are spot spraying and have hard water. But if a person is using larger amounts doing something to condition the water can make a difference of the effectiveness.

When we are using thousands of gallons of water at a time (our sprayer is 1600 gallons) we condition the water with an agent that ties up the minerals in the water before the glyphosate comes in contact with the water. We used to use ammonium sulfate (spray grade of fertilizer basically). It is kind of a pain to handle so more lately we use commercial water conditioners that are in liquid form that does the same thing. But something easier that a home owner can do for modest amounts of spray mixture is simply use distilled or reverse osmosis drinking water. Pure water instead of water laden with minerals or dirt.

There were some extension studies about using distilled water as the carrier for roundup thirty years ago (back when roundup was $80 a gallon) that showed it was cost effective using distilled water as a carrier. Then the price of RU came down and they came up with water conditioners to tie up the offending minerals that were tieing up the RU so nothing ever came of it.

But you can make glyphosate herbicide more effective by using either completely clean water (distilled) or conditioning the water.

Wow, that was a long boring tirade. But rather than just erase and not post it, someone might be interested.

Edit: Roundup RTU is ready to use with the carrier (water) already included so if you use that homeowner product disreguard all of the above. I'm talking about concentrated RU or generics (typically 4# of active ingredient or above) where it is diluted with water as a carrier of the product before sprayed.

P.S. The above description is also why roundup is deactivated almost immediately when it hits the ground. Only what actually hits the plant stays active. The soil deactivates RU almost immediately. It is not a soil residual herbicide.

Do some searches and all that information is available. I have read most of that over my farming career but I just don't trust my memory to quote it correctly. I know the ammonium sulfate that we used to use to condition the water (and now we use a much more user friendly though more expensive liquid conditioner) tied up certain ions so that the ions would not tie up the glyphosate. But I can't remember without looking it up so I can't say for sure on the softened water. The salt in the softened water might tie up the RU worse. Just can't remember. Glyphosate is a salt, by the way. Table salt will also kill plants if you put enough on. It just does not take much of glyphosate salt.

Here is the easiest solution if you don't want to be a chemist. If you spray a fair amount of RU around your place periodically, simply go to about any coop or farm supply where they sell chemicals to farmers and ask for some water conditioner for use with Roundup. I'll go over to the shed tonight and get you a brand name but there are numerous brand names that work. It will be in a 2.5 gallon jug and it will last you for years (and it is cheap). You will not need a restricted use pesticides applicators license because it is not a restricted use chemical. In a three gallon hand sprayer just put your water in, put three or four tablespoons of the conditioner in, slosh the water around to disperse, then put the glyphosate it. Problem solved. The conditioner will have the right stuff to tie up the ions that are responsible for tying up the RU.

There are populations of weeds that have become resistant to RU. They gain this naturally over time by natural selection. We have populations of waterhemp and marestail that glyphosate will hardly touch it. It is nothing about the chemical causing the plant to change, it is all about natures natural selection process. Any plant that produces gazillions of seeds has the propensity to develop resistance much quicker than plants with low numbers of seeds. It is all about probabilities.

In any plant population of most if not all species there will be the one plant in a thousand or million or billion that will show natural resistance to a herbicide. So lets say in this particular field there is one plant in a billion seeds that have germinated that has this natural resistance to RU (or any other chemical for that matter). You spray the field but this one lone plant survives and produces seed. You have started the resistant portion of the natural selection process. Now if you rotate to some other crop or use mechanical cultivation to destroy it or use some other chemical to get it then maybe that is the end of that resistant population (the importance of mixing up chemicals and modes of action of chemicals and other means of control such as mechanical). But lest say you use only RU in that field for 10 years in a row and it is the only herbicide used. That one resistant plant produces seed. If it is a coclebur plant maybe it only produces a thousand seeds. But if it is a small seeded waterhemp maybe it has 10,000 seeds (see why small seeded plants develop resistance worse?). The next year you spray RU instead on one plant surviving the chemical (remember the RU is still effectively killing the bazillion other plants in the field successfully) ten plants survive. Then the next year a hundred. The next year a thousand plants and so on and so on. All the while the RU is successfully killing all the other plants just like it always have. But you notice each year more and more plants are not being killed. It is not that the plants have modified their construction or genetic make up to resist the RU. It has just been a process of natural selection where you have been killing the plants susceptible to RU while allowing the plants naturally resistant to it to multiply. Then at some point the plants that are naturally resistant out number the plants that are not. And you have a weed resistant to RU. It is not that the weed has changed. It is a natural selection process of naturally occurring resistance. That is why best management practices are used to keep the process happening as slowly as possible. Roundup Ready crops that resist RU originally were selected in the same way, from populations of naturally resistant plants within a susceptible population. Now they do it a lot faster because they can identify the genes that control the resistance and insert them artificially, vastly speeding up the selection process compared to raising many generations of crops.

Long winded explanation to tell you if you use the same chemical over and over and over and over again, you are naturally selecting for the plants that naturally resist it. Its all natures way of adapting.

Roundup does not work as well in cold temperatures. That is likely because most plants do not translocate nutrients as well in cold weather. But very susceptible plants (johnsongrass for example) will still get a good kill in cold (fall) weather. Plants that are tougher to kill with RU (winter annuals like henbit for example) do not respond very well in early cold spring weather. That is why RU has problems with the winter annuals in the spring. A combination of the chemical doesn't work that great on them to begin with and the fact that winter annuals main growth period is when it is in the cold parts of the year RU just isn't that great of chemical on those. 2,4D on the other hand will whack them (but it is volatile so you have to be mindful of your neighbors flowers or garden).

I can't say why your RU doesn't always work. There could be various reasons from the plant not being very susceptible, to resistant populations, to dirty carrier water inactivating the chemical.

If you leave RU in your sprayer over night, spike it a little the next day. The water may have already tied up the glyphosate. Best to use it all within a few hours of mixing. Distilled water will eliminate that, conditioned water will help it.