Hi everyone! I'm George & this is my 1st post here.

I have a question but the info I've read here isn't specific to my conditions, so, I thought I'd post.

We have a pond only because we needed soil to fill around our new built retirement home in Michigan. We really didn't want a pond because I don't fish & we didn't want to spend our retirement cutting cattails & raking algae out of it which we did the first few years. But, we need back fill so we wound up with one.

The pond is bean shaped, roughly 150' x 90' & 15' at the deepest. The pond is 100% rain water feed; no streams feed into the pond & overflow only drains in the spring. In the late summer the water level falls several feet.

The soil dug out for the pond was grey clay. Nothing would grow in areas where this clay is spread around the house. We needed topsoil brought in just get to grow grass. And because the pond soil is clay based, I doubt if anything seeps very deep into it.

A few years ago I mentioned to a local farmer that we spent a few days cutting cattails & raking algae. He laughed & recommended Karmex (Diuron 80), that he used it all the time. The local co-op who sold it said with my conditions (a clay based pond where no water was flowing into or out of it) was OK.

When I 1st used it, it was windy & some did get on the grass as a powder. It killed grass everywhere it touched. I had to shovel those areas out & replace the soil & grow new grass. Since then, I have mixed in water, then splashed it into the pond. I also learned to wait until the pond stops draining (late May) before using Karmex, so, water treated with Karmex never flows out of the pond.

I guess my question is why wouldn't using Karmex be OK under my conditions? My pond is clay based. Grass isn't dying near the pond. Trees nearby are fine, nothing is dying. Unlike my farmer neighbors who spray their fields with Karmex, which is eventually washed into the great lakes nearby, my pond water stays on my property.

So, why wouldn't using Karmex be OK?

Last edited by GARoss; 05/29/13 07:55 AM.