How to Get Rid of Cattails – What Are The Basics?

Cattails are a normal phenomenon within many North American environments, most especially occurring in or around bodies of water, and initially seeming fairly harmless. At first you may notice one of these plants and dismiss it. You might just believe the same thing the next day, and the day after that, and maybe several days following that, until that one day that you look out the window, and your entire pond has been taken over to a point in which you require an air-boat to get through it like you’re living in the everglades.

Now that you’ve been invaded by the cunning army of the cattail, what kind of offensive will you do? Will you rally your troops and run in with guns (or pesticides) blazing? Or will you choose guerrilla warfare? The methods are totally for you to decide, because no matter which technique you decide on, the plants are not sentient, so they won’t see you coming, indicating that you’ll constantly possess the element of surprise. That also means that you could likely get rid of that camouflage and take the paint off of your face.  The binoculars and gas mask probably won’t be required either.

The options at your disposal are not few in the area of cattail destruction, and of course, since the pond is yours (unless for an unknown purpose you’ve decided to do battle with your next door neighbor’s pond), you’re welcome to pick any of these methods:

Physical Removal – You’re of course, free to try pulling those cattails up by yourself. But if you do that, attempt to get to them when they are very young, lest they take sturdy root and end up very hard to pull. This will also become a all order, because by the time that you get around to eliminating them, chances are they’ve already overrun the pond, and there will be a ton of them.

Cutting – You may chop down the cattails, but remember that it’s smart to chop them somewhere around an inch under the water line so as to starve them of oxygen and they will die.

Lowering the Water Line – Cattails, like anything else, need water in order to live. By lowering the water line, and ensuring those plants don’t receive everything they require, you’ll discover they expire pretty fast, that is unless they have actually spread their seed, in which case you’ll have to do it all over again the next year. If you’ve no problem with lowering and raising the water level in your pond every year, then that would be a viable option for you.

Pesticides – This should be a last resort, because pesticides may damage the organic life in the pond, which sort of defeats the purpose of owning a pond. However, you may still buy any pesticides that you need from both stores, or from online. Simply don’t forget the dangers.

Keep another thing in mind, you might think cattails are a major issue and you have to destroy all of them, however take note that cattails help stop erosion, and that’s definitely a good thing. Therefore remember to leave at the very least a few cattails standing, since every creature (wasps excluded) serve a purpose, even though the purpose is as yet unknown.