Aquacide Blog — aquatic weed control

That pretty plant flowering in your pond may be an invasive pond weed!  It seems so healthy and abundant, yet you can’t remember planting it there. Water Hyacinth is sold in nurseries but will easily spread from ornamental ponds to adjoining wetlands.

Water Starwort are small delicate weeds usually found in shallow water.  It has fine stems that are 10 to 20 cm long with leaves opposite and arranged in pairs.  The submersed delicate leaves are a pale green and linear.  The upper leaves are rounded and crowded at the top forming a rosette that floats on the surface. Water Starwort reproduces by seed and stem fragments.  Ducks & other waterfowl feed on stems and fruit.  Weeds also produce food and shelter for fish and aquatic insects. Aquacide Pellets will help to control Water Starwort if applied early in the season when weeds...

Duckweed and Watermeal are free floating pond weeds that are found in wetlands and nutrient rich stagnant water. They are often mistaken for algae. Pond weed identification can be done by recognizing its small, round floating “frond” or leaf. Duckweed frond has hanging roots and is roughly the diameter of a pencil eraser. Watermeal has no roots and looks like floating grass seed about the size of a pin-head. Duckweed and Watermeal reproduce by budding on the margin or base of the frond. Each frond can only do this a limited number of times before dying. Both survive freezing and...

Once a clean lake in the 1980s, Squaw Lake in Oxford Township is slowly being taken over by Eurasian Milfoil.  Thick beds of Eurasian Milfoil now blanket most of the lake bottom. The lake is shrinking because the shore is thick with weed growth.  Squaw Lake was once used for water skiing and swimming, kids don’t swim there anymore. Eurasian Milfoil spread from boat propellers chopping fragments and raking it free and dumping fragments back into the water.  Eurasian Milfoil has the ability to root from fragmentation so new  colonies developed from just one small stem. Mechanical harvesting does not...

Just like the 1958 science fiction classic movie “The Blob”, Giant Salvinia burst onto the scene in the United States, becoming one of the world’s worst invasive aquatic plants.  In 1998 Giant Salvinia was recognized as a U.S. problem when eradication was resisted near Houston, Texas. Giant Salvinia has an “explosive” growth rate and can easily double in size in just a few days. Native to Southern Brazil, Giant Salvinia is now found in India, South East Asia, Africa, New Guinea, Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, New Zealand and a host of other countries including the United States. Biologists believe Giant Salvinia was...