Blanket weed

BenCotto · January 2018

I have a one year old pond, approx 4 x 3 metres and, once it had settled, the water was very clear. There was, and is, a battle with blanket weed. It is a pond for plants and wild life only, not fish.

Does anybody have a recommendation for dealing with the blanket weed? Twirling a cane was effective last year but I wonder if barley straw (is this visually intrusive?), barley straw flakes or straw extract would be better.

i know shading the pond with plants is good advice and, this season, I hope the plants will be bigger and so more effective in that respect.

Thank you.

Lyn · January 2018

Get the pond over half covered with oxygenating weed, the blanket weed will go. No need for chemicals, once the balance is right its all right. In the meantime, twiddling is very therapeutic I find. I had some when I first started our pond but by the next year it was clear.

Dovefromabove · January 2018

I find the barley straw extract very good when getting a pond established ... it's no more a 'chemical' than a bale of barley straw is. ... but as Lyn says, once the oxygenating weed is thriving and you get some leaf cover over the surface of the pond e.g. lily pads or water soldier etc, the blanket weed will decrease considerable. Our pondsnails eat what there is left.

treehugger80 · January 2018

half the surface needs shading, luckily water lilies work great and are very pretty

madpenguin · January 2018

I use barley straw logs and found them very effective.

I have also used a product called Blanket Answer which also worked well.

Duckweed also helps but can take over a pond with no fish!!!

BenCotto · August 2018

A height of summer update. The water surface is now about 60% covered with water lily but the blanket weed flourished with a vengeance. I have had four barley straw bales in the pond for about 11 weeks but they have had no discernible effect. Incidentally, I was worried that the bales would be visually intrusive - they’re not. They are the size of a small rolled towel and within days sank to just below the water level so could scarcely be seen.

Unimpressed by straw bales, instead I bought a £16 tub of Nishikoi Clear Waters Blanketweed (a Which? Best Buy). The results were impressive and obvious within days. Now all the blanket weed has disintegrated. It is still just there, on the sides and base of the pond, but its volume is only about 5% of the original and it is a very unobtrusive blackish khaki colour. Try to scoop it out by hand or net and it breaks up into tiny filaments. Before the treatment there was also a very minor swirl of duck weed but that has almost all disappeared as well.

I still feel the pond needs more oxygenators and would be grateful for recommendations. There were many in the pond but none has survived particularly well, not helped by them being periodically scooped out in the manual culling of the blanket weed.

Dovefromabove · August 2018

Native hornwort does the job in our pond

Pete.8 · August 2018

I added hornwort to my pond over a year ago and assumed it'd died.
All of a sudden over the last few weeks it's taking over the pond! I'm even pulling some out along with lots of elodea. I added some pond snails last week and they're already cleaning up the sides of the pond nicely.
If you've got a lot of rotting plant material in your pond it may be an idea to add some sludge buster. It breaks down the rotting plant material and stops build-up of harmful substances.
I have no idea if it works, but I've been adding Blagdon Sludge Control to my pond this year along with Blagdon Barley Straw extract. There's no noticeable blanket weed.

Dovefromabove · August 2018

Before we got our pond snails we used the Blagdon Sludge Control and the Barley Straw Extract with very good results. Now the pond snails have increased in number (doing what pond snails seem to do all the time, even when eating blanket weed) and we have no need to add anything to the water.

Pete.8 · August 2018

Dovefromabove said:

Now the pond snails have increased in number (doing what pond snails seem to do all the time, even when eating blanket weed) and we have no need to add anything to the water.

They are very amorous aren't they. I'm guessing there will be quite a few of them soon..
Do they go well with garlic?

Lyn · August 2018

That’s probably why mine has stayed clear. I had it at the beginning, Dove will remember how therapeutic it was for me to sit there twiddling it out.
The Hornwort is very good as is Elodea.(better not mentioned😀)

I don’t know where these snails come from they just appear, I suppose they must have been on the oxygenating plants that I bought first off. Just 10 strands of each from eBay.

Blanket weed

Posts