Duckweed question

Two garden ponds, each with many frogs, one pond covered in duckweed, should we remove any/much/all ?.

Frogs hopping overnight to second pond and taking duckweed with them, is this a problem?

Does duckweed present any problems?

 

As far as I am aware duckweed causes no problems other than to look terrible. Remove it if you like (or can)

 

I have read that too much duckweed can cause oxygen drop and end up killing fish/wildlife. I can testify to this as last year (before I cleared up my pond) the entire surface of the small pond was covered in duckweed, and at the end of one hot day i went out to find hundreds of dead tadpoles.

I try to keep on top of the weed now, but its and unending task as it multiplies so quickly. and I've loaded up the pond with other desirable plants with the theory that they will out complete the undesirable weeds for nutrients (time will tell).

 

I got my first tadpoles from my neighbours pond. The pond was always 100% covered in duckweek. To get tadpoles all you had to do was to put a container under water (I used to use a cup) bring it up and it would always be full of swimming tadpoles.

Duckweed has been covering ponds for years (and still does) I doubt it was the reason your tadpoles died. If duckweed was that bad there would be all sorts of things available to get rid of it.

 

I must admit I've never found duck weed to be detrimental other than appearance.

In fact it seems to be the best way of clearing green water.
If there is duck weed floating on the surface the chances are the water underneath will be totally clear.

I've never heard of tadpoles dyeing due to lack of oxygen, they are great survivors and can live in just a puddle if it lasts long enough.

 

I used to get a lot of duckweed on my ponds, not a problem in the pond or to the fish .
But I can't see the fish, the whole point of having a pond is to watch the wildlife.
Well I think so.
This year I started to use liquid barley and so far so good.
A little duckweed but nothing to what I normally get and it seems to be controlling the blanket weed too.

 

You can also use barley straw, however its usually sold as a product to rid a pond of blanket weed, its supposed to be to do with the fact of the barley straw rotting that makes it work, but some say it does some say it doesn't.