Maximise the availability of free nutrition, the key to growing fish on supplementary feeds.

March 15, 2018 0 Comments

Living the dream spreading manure around the margins of some ponds this weekend, this will leak nutrient into the pond over time and kick start a thriving food chain when the weather warms up. Fertilising the sources of free nutrition!

However, the art of fishery management isn’t as straight forward as that...
I wouldn’t fertilise a pond thats likely to become weedy in the summer or the nutrient will just feed the weed! Neither would I use manure on a silty pond, instead apply chalk to encourage the organic breakdown of the silt which will release nitrate and have the same effect as manure, but chalk which will also neutralise ph and combat the build up of acidic silt layers.

The perfect candidate for manure are the pools that i treated on the weekend, they have only served 1 growing season, so they still have a clean clay substrate which is not as fertile as the more mature pools.

Choose your poo carefully...💩

We use horse manure rather than cattle. Slurry storage on farms are also a dumping ground for feed waste, and silage effluent has shown to be up to 200 times more toxic that untreated sewage!

Spread around the margins rather than directly into the water. Its also important to apply in the winter, applying manure in the warmer months is likely to trigger an aggressive algal bloom and have a sudden impact the BOD so you need to be sensible with it, but like fertilising a field, it does make a difference... and its FREE!