Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - FA from top to bottom

My pond perimeter is covered in FA from the pond bottom to the water surface. The algae is as deep as 6 feet and covering my man-made SMB spawning beds. I successfully treated the floating FA earlier in the season with Cutrine Plus, and the algae quickly turned brown and disappeared. Now when I spray the surface mats, they just turn brown and stay there. I assume that the FA is still alive and anchored to the bottom and thus not going anywhere.

I did an extensive killing of cattail and rice cutgrass this summer, so I wonder if this has encouraged even more algae growth. I am using Black Dyemond for shading, yet the visibility is 7 feet with a Secchi disk. On the upside, there are thousands of minnows swimming around in the FA. I stocked 3" YP in June, and plan to stock SMB this fall.

Suggestions? I can try to hit the submerged algae with Cutrine Plus with the sprayer wand or try Cutrine Plus granular. Next year I will look into Tilapia.

https://imgur.com/a/8GiIvLl

(Looks like imgur changed their image hosting for the worse. There is no longer the easy option to embed the image inline with BBCode. Grrrr.)

Edit: The BBCode is back. Not sure what happened when I posted yesterday.

Just my experience , with Tilapia . Wherever roots of land plants extended out of bank , trees , etc , Tilapia as small as 1" , by the hundreds would be sucking up and down these roots removing FA. Anything in the pond that had FA anchored to it , was cleaned promptly by small to medium Tilapia. The growing from Fry to Fingerling , to sexually mature was not wasted for removing FA. May have been the variety of Tilapia, the species of FA or other variable , but 3 years out of 3 , my Tilapia ate FA reliably at all visible ages of Tilapia. 1st year , an all white Tilapia From Moore's , 2nd year , a greenish Tilapia , from Moore.s , 3rd year a beautiful golden Tilapia from Harbins in Okla. All worked great , all delicious when scooped out of shallows the 3rd week of November., Have never had to wait for Tilapia to grow to a certain length or maturity to start feasting on FA .

Knobber, take a look at this video and see if maybe this might help you? At least it would help you get the shore line cleared and then maybe wind would move more algae to the shore again?

If you had a front end loader or dump style trailer of some type you could discharge into the trailer or FEL to let the water drain out and then dump in a pile in the woods.

I leave my algae in a pile just far enough away that it can't get nutrients back into the pond. It dries out pretty quickly but not enough to burn unless it is spread thin say around plants in a garden.

I have a small tractor with loader so now it is easier for me to move the semi-dry piles. I try to mix some leaves in with the algae and this year I'm dumping large scoops of leaves/algae and compost into my chicken coop. The chickens dig through it for any worms or bugs and in the process of spreading it all out for me and clawing through it they rapidly turn it into regular dirt for me.

hm... can't get the inline link of the youtube video to embed into the post using the embed video option in the full screen editor. Maybe someone else can test on their end to see if that is true for me only or for everyone.

I'll just put the link here and you'll have to copy/paste it or click the link to open it.

DIY algae pump

Another quick kill option for curly leaf pondweed (CLP) is to use a brand of Diquat 37%. READ and understand the instructions. I regularly use it in my pond and it works good when applied timely and appropriately. If you do it correctly you should see die back results in several to 10 days.

Note - if there is a huge biomass of CLP that you are quickly killing, there could be a significant DO sag and maybe a fish kill? Be watchful.

If treating the whole pond use bottom aeration to help mix the diquat throughout the pond.

Herbicides work best for CLP before it has reached the surface, formed flower buds, and not yet formed turions in the axils of the leaf. You being in MI,,,, turions should not have formed as of May 03. Turions are dormant buds that develop in leaf axils (the "joint " or space where the leaf stem and the stalk of the plant come together), or are present at the tip of short branches. They are made up of several overlapping modified leaves resembling small greenish-brown pinecones, and are produced in great numbers by the start of summer.

Turions that have formed before killing the CLP will sprout this Fall and the next spring for producing CLP in future years requiring more annual treatments. IMO you will likely have to do some form or retreatments in the upcoming years. I do some spot treatments for CLP using diquat sprayed using a long wand into the clumps of CLP. CLP is a definite early season pest.

IMO do not use the 'weedtrine' that is a diluted form of diquat and requiring more jugs to deal with.

Just a reminder - the floating FA is already dead/dying.

Start looking now for next year - legality in MI, sources, number of pounds you are going to want.

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.

My results with Tilapia was not that the young would not eat the FA, but that I didn't stock enough. I think in southern ponds you can get by with stocking less of the larger more expensive ones because in the longer growing season the stockers will thousands of babies, maybe once maybe more than once in a long hot Texas summer? It is the multiplication of thousands that work well to trim back on the FA as Fishingadventure describes above.

In my case due to short warm weather season the stockers did not make babies so it was only the initial stockers vs the algae. The adult TP also eat other things besides FA like bugs and even little fish so not all their diet was towards the FA.

I stocked 3-4" stockers and didn't weight them but was probably close to 10 pounds in a quarter acre puddle so close to 40#/acre. They didn't make a sizable dent in the FA. That means that I probably would have to stock many more. It would be ideal if I could bring a tank inside and see if a few breeding pairs could produce thousands of young TP to go in the pond once weather warms up in the spring but I'm not set up or have the know how to keep a tank of fish alive all winter inside.

Aquaponics is not a big hobby or industry here so we struggle to source the TP as well.

Use the FA as plant mulch. It helps hold the moisture around the plant.

Knobber,

Thanks for posting your "how to" kit.

Presumably the trade off for all of your hard work is that you are starting to develop the arms of a lumberjack.

Here are my mechanical tools at the moment. It's backbreaking work, so I only do a couple loads each day. Some patches of FA are far away and require chest waders to reach.

The drag is the "Yard Glider" that is relentlessly in my FB feed. I pulled the trigger and bought the basic model. Pricey, but heavy duty, and perfect for this application. Good for loading and unloading heavy mats of algae - no lifting and water drains right off.

I am doing all this by hand, and it is awkward for sure. I use the pool noodle float on the rake to snare just the floating mats on the 11-inch rake tines. A full rake load is about my limit than I can effectively maneuver - maybe 35 lbs?. As the rake nears shore, I try to orient it vertically, to keep algae from falling off the tines. I then carry the rake over the yardglider and rotate so the algae slides off the tines.

Still, some algae strands remain at the shore. I pick them up by hand or just let it be. If there is still a lot of submerged algae, I take off the float from the rake and go deeper. This usually fouls the entire rake frame with algae and weeds, making it harder to slide stuff off.

Congrats on beating back your FA. Thanks for posting your report on phosphorus binder treatments. That sounds to me like a very promising tool for pond management. I suspect that as we use it more, we will better define the most advantageous treatment protocols.


There was an old lady who swallowed a fly ...

Thanks, canyoncreek. That pump is clever, and it looks suitable for occasional cleanup of small, floating, patches of FA. However, I have thick mats on the surface, and boulder-sized mounds of FA below the surface, which would bog down that pump.

I have pricey rake with 11-inch tines that was recommended by another forum member. It works well, but the loads are heavy. I use the pool noodle float to snare just the surface mats and keep the algae off the frame of the rake. I take off the pool noodle float to scrape my SMB spawning beds that are 2-5 ft below the surface.

Yeah, I figured a tractor or skid steer with a bucket would be the way to go.

I am seriously considering tilapia next spring. Also, I am reading up on phosphorous binders. I'll start a new thread on that topic

Sorry to hear about your algae. It is disheartening to see that growing under the ice.

Try a strong green laser pointer on the geese to scare them away.

Best way to control nutrient levels? Yeah, everybody says it is important, but few specifics are ever given. My plan this year is to remove dead plant matter, shoo away geese, and apply a phosphorous binder. I am also using pond dye.

Totally agree on the reality. I have spent a tremendous amount of time raking, applying chemicals ($$$) and killing muskrats in just 2 years since building this pond.

If you don't have flowing water into/out of the pond it's not too late to use Fluridone. A 10 ppb dose will do it.