water hyacinth?

I have HEAVY clay soil over our entire place. I have a 3/4 acre pond that currently has large mouth bass, red ear, and blue gills, 5 ducks, one goose and lots of turtles. The pond is down hill from our septic discharge. Currently we are not reusing any of the graywater so it all ends up in the pond. We have 6 children so there are 8 of us using the system. Lots of nutrients enter the pond. Too much actually as we had a giant filamentous algae bloom last winter and early spring.

I am thinking of transplanting water hyacinth into the pond to absorb the excess nutrients, create shade, and harvest the excess as a mulch/compost. From what I have read it is the worlds fastest growing plant capable of doubling in as little as 28 days. Once in the pond it will be hard if not impossible to get rid of but should be an abundant source of biomass. It is defiantly on the evasive list but here it is ok to transplant into your own pond, just not public waters.


Good Idea or bad?

If you can fish the stuff out with a net or something, I don't see why that would be a problem.

I "harvest" algea from my ponds to put around plants.

they are a weed aren't they? It is always good to use weeds though....

I would create shallow areas for cattails and other nutrients hungry shore plants.

 Water hyacinth can take over completely,  creating a solid mat.

 Quite often large quantities of hyacinth die all at once.  This causes an oxygen crash which kills all fish.

Dale Hodgins wrote:I would create shallow areas for cattails and other nutrients hungry shore plants.

 Water hyacinth can take over completely,  creating a solid mat.

 Quite often large quantities of hyacinth die all at once.  This causes an oxygen crash which kills all fish.

I think I will ditch this Idea. I took three of my kids to the local reservoir to have a go at harvesting a pickup load as a trial run for compost. It was a much bigger pita than I had envisioned. The kids did have a ball though.

My forced labor crew. Don't they look like they hate there job? lol