I have never planted any plants in two large ponds. If I start with either of the above, what am I biting off? Will they multiply like mad making it worse than nothing, or are they good for the fish, etc? I have rainbow trout in the pond, some now rather large. The late afternoon wind will probably always move them to the east side of the pond, but that should be no big deal. I'd love your advice on plants.
Bill
water hyacinths, water lettuce, or...
Bill, I doubt your trout will bother either water lettuce or water hyacinths. I've got water hyacinths growing in my pond this year and they're growing relatively fast. But 'fast' doesn't mean that you go to bed one night wake up the next morning and find them knocking on your door! :-)) The nice thing is that you can always scoop out a bunch at any time and dump them in a compost heap - and in the process you've also removed that much phosphorous and other 'stuff' that was tied up in the plant mass. If you put something in your pond and then go away for a couple of months then you might have issues of crowding but a lot of that is also dependent on water temperature. I suspect that if you've got trout in your pond that the water temps are 'coolish'. I'm running right about 85°F this week but if we've got a bit of cool weather it really slows things down.