This stuff is driving me crazy in the old smithy pond - for some reason, touch wood, we eradicated it here in the cottage pond & I'm not too sure how! It's a never ending battle scooping it all out, endless, slimey strands of the stuff! I was wondering if any of you have ponds & this weed & how you manage it? Straw bales I've heard work, but we did try that once & it made no difference, the blanket weed just grew all over it!!!!

Any tips please

I've tried the straw thing too and not had much success, it has to be barley straw though, apparently it doesn't work with wheat or any other cereal. Do you know if the pond had fish in it before? this might have reduced the numbers of natural organisms that eat the weed so with time numcers of beetles etc will build up and may help reduce it. I have a very similar problem, always have done since i had a pond so if anyone else has any advice it would be greatly recieved!

I had the blanket weed problem when i had a pond ,straw never helped ,i found the only way was to put in a stick and twirl it round and pull the blanket weed out like that,but it can be a real problem.
I always left the stuff at the edge of the pond for a while so any wildlife caught up in it could crawl back in

celticsparrowjan Wrote:I had the blanket weed problem when i had a pond ,straw never helped ,i found the only way was to put in a stick and twirl it round and pull the blanket weed out like that,but it can be a real problem.
I always left the stuff at the edge of the pond for a while so any wildlife caught up in it could crawl back in

I always used that method when I got rid of mine. We had a big pond when we lived in Kent. We put a bridge over the pond and never got any blanket weed under the bridge, as I don't think the sunlight could get under there. The sunlight makes the weed grow rapidly.

There are chemicals that you can buy, but not everyone wants to use them, and then they only work for a little while. Good luck with it.

If Snowdrops comes on the forum, she may be able to help you with this. ( she used to be my neighbour in Kent). She has a pond and I think she told me about something that we could use.

It got me thinking, since we are talking about blanket weed, that if or when I get my pond, how do I attract the frogs and newts into it. I had a pond when we lived in Kent, but my neighbour also had one, so I am sure that many of the frogs came from her ond, but I just don't know how to go about it!! ........... Will I have to go and nick somebodies frogspawn???????

I think you'll find that they will find their own way there Jan. . .when we built our pond some years ago we were soon inundated with them!! Infact they still come back to the garden now even though we no longer have the pond!!

Jillypud Wrote:I think you'll find that they will find their own way there Jan. . .when we built our pond some years ago we were soon inundated with them!! Infact they still come back to the garden now even though we no longer have the pond!!

\Thanks JIlly thats good news

Or you can get a nearby FON member to give you some...thats what I did for Cazza. However you need to be quite near cos a car trip can be a little warm for those delicate taddies.

Make sure you dont get any nasty pervasive duckweed that we have in our pond.It covers the whole pond by summer and we cant look in.

NB Barley straw worked in our pond, plus get the blanket weed out with a hairbrush tied to a stick!

In true l'oreal advert style - here's the science bit! Blanketweed thrives in high-phosphate conditions. By avoiding phosphate inputs (fish food, tapwater) and introducing assimilative phosphate control you can starve it out.

In other words, only top up your pond with rainwater and introduce emergent plants which won't get smothered and will lock-up some nutrients. Watercress is the best one that I know, unless you fancy the tender floating plants such as water hyacinth which is used for sewage treatment in some tropical countries. You can grow the watercress that you buy in supermarkets - it'll root within a few days but will be more effective planted in a pond basket to ensure that it doesn't run out of nutrients such as iron. Keep it from flowering to encourage lots of hungry vegetative growth.

The only wildlife-friendly organism that eats it is the Ramshorn snail Planorbis. Other snails such as the Great pond snail Lymnaea will eat plants.

Adding native plants for shade will help - try Callitriche, Nuphar, Nymphoides or Nymphaea.

You can add phosphate-removing resins available from decent aquatic retailers and these work if you add enough relative to water volume. Barley straw works by giving off small quantities of hydrogen peroxide as it decomposes but it's a bit erratic..

(This post was last modified: 06-05-08, 10:25 AM by Toadletfan.)

Ok. Thanks for that. Next question is:- Anybody live near Northants (Corby)?????

You can get frog spawn from another pond to start the chain going or let frogs find your pond naturally. but I think I read that frogs don't mate until they're four years old, so the first lot don't come back to their birth place till then. I know it was about that timespan before we got them on a regular
annual basis.

No way, barley straw takes a few years to make a difference, remove waht you can, use a chemical or UV to rid the rest, then creat shade with overhanging plants or shrubs. Its totaly reliant on stangnat surface water, heat and full sun, you need to tackle its needs if you want rid of it.

Peter's right we had problems with blanket weed at out old house & the use of natural water plus plenty of plants is the best way to get rid of it. We succeeded after a couple of years; I think we used a chemical as well though I'm not a fan of putting chemicals into ponds. I found duck weed far more of a problem, I got a scoop for taking chips from a chip fryer that had been thrown out by the local chippie the best thing for skimming the water, the trouble was you could be clear for a year if you worked hard then suddenly it would be back again.
I must bear all this in mind for our pond, it was going to be a slow process digging out 25` x 15` x 4`- 0 for a bog area when most of the area is full of rubble and the ground rises up by around 18" over the proposed site, the highest area is thankfully where I want the bog area to be or there would have been far more digging to do. I love the hard work but struggle with the time, however next door has a mini digger in tomorrow clearing the site where his hay barn burnt down, so I may see if he'll give me a couple of hours to dig it out.
I've Water Avens, Water Cinquefoil, Bog Bean, Water Mint, Flag Iris, Purple Loosestrife, Marsh Marigolds & Marsh Valerian all waiting to go in. I'd also like some Common Reed which is beautiful with its purple flowering heads, Branched Burr Reed & Flowering Rush plus plenty of Sedges..