Monday, Monday

And the livin' is still hot hot hot. Not anything we are not used to like the rest of the country. How do you folks handle our weather, but without air conditioning? How hot is it? So hot that I didn't write anything here yesterday, so you can stop hitting your refresh button now. We have had oodles of rain in New Orleans. It is normal to have oodles of rain this time of year, but we have had so little since Katrina that we are not used to it. If you stand still very long, there's a good chance mildew will start creeping up your legs.

Oh, ponds, that's right. We talk about ponds here. The cursed blanket weed is rampant this year again because we did not have a freeze again last winter. That's two winters in a row with no freezes. So the filamentous algae flourishes. But under it, if you can get under it, the water is happy and so are the fish. It is the humans who are not happy. We have experimented with many things to control blanketweed. Some of us use a beer and it works! No one really knows why, but it does. One wonders how it got tried the first time. A mishap at a yard party perhaps? The only thing I know works is Microbe-Lift. Great product, great company. Use the Microbe-LIft PL. Not only does it keep the blanketweed at bay, it's good for the fish. Before Microbe-Lift, I had a problem pond (a client's) and was at my wit's end as to how to control the blanketweed. I tried covering the top of the pond with water hyacinths...nope. Finally in desperation, I dyed the water black. I was dreading how it might look, but found that the black water made a rather ugly concrete pond a dramatic reflecting pool. The water lilies shot their flowers up from the black water and elicited ooh's and aah's from everyone. A month later, I drained the pond and NO BLANKETWEED. That was years ago and only recently has that green spaghetti reappeared. I tried it in a liner pond with rocks. It looked awful, so bad, we drained it immediately and refilled it, blanketweed and all. Microbe-Lift was the answer for that pond.