Texas Spring/Summer Thread

[pacerron]

So now we've reduced ourselves to taking pictures of weeds? Trust me! I could win that contest just with my giant ragweed around the garden perimeter.:ashamed:

Ron, your sunflowers look great. I love the close-up with the bees. I just don't know how you've managed to catch all the 'coons in that trap instead of having them destroy your corn and sunflowers. Good for you and your wife.

Jim,
The coons just cannot resist that Dad's Gourmet cat food.
And now for some more serious weed pictures...
The Texas like heat burst we had a couple weeks ago made the pond weeds grow like crazy.
Remember last year we had a few around the edges but we treated them with a 1/3rd dose of copper sulfate
and they gave up fast, or so it looked. One of our 2 sterile, 20 year old, bottom carp was lying dead on the bank last winter and we haven't
seen the other one. We put two new ones in this spring, but many folks say they don't eat algae. I'm not sure what this stuff really is but you can see from the pictures
that we have the leaf type floating on top of the water, the stuff that looks like a hairy mat floating just under the surface, and I think a rooted underwater type under that on the bank of the dam.
As you can see the water is still clear where the weeds haven't taken over.
I think our biggest mistake was not raking the dead stuff out.
I was going to buy the wife one of those pond rakes with a rope, but she didn't think the suit would fit
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Do you have these type water pests in your ponds and if so what do you do to control them? :confused3::confused2:
Ron

 

[jinman]

Ron, clear shallow water and sunshine is the key to that 'stuff' you have growing. Have you ever noticed that it rises up from just below the water to the top of the water during the daytime? I notice that on our lake all the time. In the morning, the water surface is clear, but by afternoon, the moss is up to the surface soaking in all the sunlight it can get.

Well, my entries into the Weed Wars is posted below. The last picture is my asparagus. Isn't it a weed during the summer when you aren't harvesting spears?



BTW: I bet I can count the number of girls who have used weed rakes and look like that on one finger. Is that Farmgirl19 with tinted hair?:laughing:

 

[farmgirl19]

BTW: I bet I can count the number of girls who have used weed rakes and look like that on one finger. Is that Farmgirl19 with tinted hair?:laughing:

Holy Cow, jinman!! Thanks for the compliment! If that was me, it was taken 4 years ago at age 25, not 29! :laughing:

 

[pacerron]

Well, my entries into the Weed Wars is posted below. The last picture is my asparagus. Isn't it a weed during the summer when you aren't harvesting spears?
BTW: I bet I can count the number of girls who have used weed rakes and look like that on one finger. Is that Farmgirl19 with tinted hair?:laughing:

Jim,
How's a couple feet higher than a 6 foot rule measure up?
I doubt if that's FG-19. I hear she doesn't like tan lines.

 

[robbyr]

Pacerron, reckon your wife can come down and rake my pond?

 

[robbyr]

I remember in the eighties there was some kind of lily pads or something that pretty much took over our pond. It was discovered that a fly powder for cattle called Karmex would kill it. But I think Karmex was discontinued a good while back.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

I would pay that gal $5 an hour to come clean my pond!!!

 

[farmgirl19]

I would pay that gal $5 an hour to come clean my pond!!!

Your wife won't even let you go to Oshkosh with Bindian and me! You think she's going to let you have that at your place? :laughing:

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

Your wife won't even let you go to Oshkosh with Bindian and me! You think she's going to let you have that at your place? :laughing:

Only after she rationalizes that its either her or the girl in the pink ****** (GIPB) who has to do it.

 

[pacerron]

I remember in the eighties there was some kind of lily pads or something that pretty much took over our pond. It was discovered that a fly powder for cattle called Karmex would kill it. But I think Karmex was discontinued a good while back.

robbyr
I see Karmex is still available but not for pond use.
We have fish in there so we try to be very careful about chemicals.
As I understand it, if you kill off the plants too quickly, with anything, the fish are starved for oxygen as the plants are dying.
I may have to make some sort of towable floating rake/skimmer to pull with a rope with the tractor to get a lot of the stuff out before using
even a small dose of copper sulfate in the middle. I was thinking of putting some copper sulfate in a cloth and tying it and an empty milk jug to the center of a long piece of old baling string so my wife and I could keep it above the water but get it to the middle with each of us on one end of the string on the banks. Then we could let it down in the water and pull it along till it dissolves. That's what we have done in the past along the edges using a bamboo pole with a bag tied on the end.
We used a light dose of the blue dye stuff to block the sunlight, a few times in years past, but I hate that fake color.
Ron