Over the past week I've been doing a bunch of research on this forum about adventurous plants. My pond is .35 acres, 10 feet deep at the deepest in Central Ohio. I have two sizable Chara beds and a decent amount of FA, but no large surface mats of FA. I just put 8 lbs of tilapia in on Saturday and manually reduced the Chara by about half, since the one chara bed is just outside the beach area and no one wants to walk through that stuff.
I have some small cattails starting to try to get started which I pulled out.
So now, to the question. My research tells me that both Pickerel weed and Arrowhead have benefits and they seem to fit my needs for nutrient uptake. However, I want to go into this fully understanding what I'm getting into. What I don't want to do is to replace one problem with another bigger problem.
So for a small BOW such as mine, are Pickerelweed or Arrowhead advisable as marginal plants to update nutrients that will otherwise be consumed by FA, Chara and cattails? How much and what kind of manual manipulation will be required on a regular basis to prevent Arrowhead and Pickerelweek from taking over too much of my small relatively shallow BOW?
Are there other better options?
