Our south Louisiana HOA has 2 ponds that are about an acre each. They are stormwater ponds, so they collect the runoff through drainage pipes, and they have an overflow pipe that empties into a drainage canal when the water level rises. We are having erosion issues. Our maintenance so far has been to mow to the water edge and pay a pond management company to keep the water clear of plants and algae. We have looked into several methods of fixing the erosion control. Some of those are rip rap, bulkheads, and SOX. Another option that we are looking at is using shoreline and emergent plants to stabilize the shore. When we asked the pond management company about this, he was very much against it. He said he didn't know how he would control the unwanted vegetation without killing the wanted vegetation and has seen major problems when people decide to go this route. Another obstacle to using vegetation stabilization is the "weedy" look. People like the manicured look down to the edge of the water and are worried about snakes. Thoughts on our best course of action?

Others may have better ideas, but I'll throw all this out.

The shoreline slope is pretty steep, so control of that would be my first priority. Just looking at the pics, the eroded bank is less than a foot high, so bulkhead installers would probably want to make them higher, and then back fill them to level out the banks.That means heavy equipment on a nice bank side turf. Rip rap, even if a fabric mat is placed below it, will eventually have weeds, and spraying them will create a brown dead collar around the pond.

Let others jump in, but what I've done here and has worked really well, is to go with a base layer of concrete bags that can be staked to the pond bottom with rebar, and leave about 4" of that rebar exposed so that the next layer won't move when added. The concrete bags may not be the move elegant solution, but I've done several that are 3-4' high, and have had zero issues with them. The paper on the bags will eventually sluff off. Using some kind of pressure treated lumber for a retaining wall would work, but at some point it's going to rot, and would need to be replaced or maintained. Lot's of lakes around here, and the wooden retaining walls really look bad after aging a few years. I'm not sure the chemicals in the wood are good for the pond either.

Al pretty much nailed it. Rip rap will also create a habitat for snakes.

How stable is the water level in the ponds from month to month?

Let me ask my neighbor about SOX on Thursday. He works in Michigan City not too far from where they were installed. Take a close look at the video and take not on how much of the surrounding soil was disturbed for the installation. Are the surrounding home owners OK with that level of disturbance?

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If you go the emergent plant route, you will likely need a maintenance company who's main service is not mowing grass. Of course, a native edge comes with native wildlife (often including muskrats).

Thanks. We had a guy quote us on the SOX system. Everyone liked it except for the expense. We'll have to go a cheaper route. It does look really nice, and is the ideal solution for most of the people that live on the ponds. But, most of the people in the HOA don't live on the ponds, and really don't like spending money on them (even though the ponds keep their homes from flooding)

I like your pictures. This is what one of our ponds looked like in 2013, about 2 years after they were dug.

I remove all cattails as they emerge. There are much better emergent plants.

SOX information and more info on the Karwick Nature Park project.

I talked to the neighbor tonight. He said that the area that is excavated and covered in that video was an old dump. It was leaching "stuff" into Trail Creek AND the ground was slowly getting eroded into Trail Creek. So it was a multi pronged approach to the problem. They put a leach field under the SOX fabric and put a transfer pump in the catch basin that the leach field drained to. That leach field caught the leachate before it could make it to Trail Creek. Salmon (Kings and Skamania) use Trail Creek as a spawning area and Trail Creek dumps into Lake Michigan not that far away. That transfer pump pumped the leachate to the Waste Water Treatment Plant there in Michigan CIty, which is very close to that area. Then they re-landscaped over the SOX. He said it looks great, and it was 4 years ago that they did the work. He said it took about 2, maybe 3 months from start to finish.

Yeah, we really like the SOX system the best. You could even plant in it if wanted. You could bull nose the edges or shape however you wanted. But, the price tag is steep. To do 2100 feet of shoreline was over $100k.

The State or the Feds paid for that install there so I guess $$$ didn't matter.

For seeding a shoreline with native plants, how would you kill the turf grass at the edge?

For emergent plants, it is best to plant growing plants in the shallow water. The species that will survive depend on how much the water level fluctuates.

Use an aquatic rated glyphosate product. i.e. Shoreklear