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orange moss!!
plant pauper
Posts: 6,904
Hi all,
I have a ditch/sheugh at the boundary of my property and lately myself and my neighbour have become concerned because there is a very orange (like rust) scum on top of the water. Another neighbour down the road says it's coming down to him as well (about 500m). We are plumb in the middle of agrcultural land so we have no earthworks or anything new happening upstream. Has anyone seen anything like this before?
I don't know if this is related or even relevant but on a huge stone further up the garden, miles away from the ditch, there is a mossy growth which coincidentally or not is also bright screaming orange!
Any thoughts? Has anyone come across this kind of thing?
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That's the problem Pansyface. I'm not near anything and there's very little uphill from me. There is no industry, defunct or otherwise. I'm in the heart of arable land. There's no digging, no groundworks, no building.....nuttin! It's a real puzzle. That's why I was pinning my hopes on the mossy business. I thought maybe the ground/weather/soil conditions had thrown up something odd and if so it might just be somewhere else as well.
Sounds like some form of pollution. Could there be runoff from one of the farms?
No drilling, no boring....how very dare you, there's nothing boring here!!
No foundations,
We were thinking run off but run off of what? It's all cattle so the worst that happens is muck spreading and that happens all the time around here. The closest field that has even been turned this year is about three miles away and it was just ploughed. Nothing exciting. We're stumped!
I might give the water guys a call on Monday and they can come out and have a look see. They'll have a better idea of what goes where.
OH MY WORD!!!! That's pretty much what it looks like Pansyface!!!! I'll take a sample into work on Monday and grow it up and see what I get!!! That'll get the boffins jumping. I can feel a paper coming on! WOW!
I live in the wonderful world of bacteria but that's a new one on me. some reading to be done methinks!
Thanks all.
If my phone would stop acting the goat I would gladly post a picture or two. Trust me! Orange!
Good morning. Now I am by no means an expert on this, or indeed anything, but my thoughts are that it could just be iron rich water leaching from the soil and oxidizing when in contact with the air when it reaches the surface causing it to “rust”. Don’t know if this would work to kind of prove this but try running a magnet of some description through it and see if it sticks. If it does then I doubt there is anything to worry about. If it doesn’t wash your hands well!!! (Probably best to wear gloves just in case).
I've seen it several times in watercourses running off iron-rich land and places where there's been some discarded machinery rusting down and decomposing - iron bacteria sounds right to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_bacteria
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Ok everyone. I hope you've been paying attention in class On a previous post I mentioned that there was a ????????????
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???????? anyone????
PEAT BOG a couple of miles up the road!
Rust it is then, and copious amounts of it! Blimey! Who knew?
Thanks all for your input.