Thursday 19 July 2012

Weeding the River

There is an invasive water plant here called jussie. It establishes itself in the still, quiet sections of the rivers and fills up the étangs. In order to control it, it is necessary to carefully pull it out. Strimming it simply causes it to spread, when fragments take root after floating downstream. One of the local river technician's major tasks is co-ordinating the war on jussie. Recently he has put an information board up by the bridge in Preuilly.

It says:

...act to preserve your environment

Rivers Plan 2011 - 2015

Water Primrose Weeding

Invasive Water Primrose:
South American in origin
Without predators and very persistent
Grows rapidly and spreads by cuttings (5cm = a new plant)

Work done:
Thorough manual weeding of all the plants
Disposal by drying
They did a good job. I couldn't see any jussie down by the bridge, and there used to be some there. The only evidence of their work was a few trampled looking reeds.

Susan

3 comments:

Pollygarter said...

Having done much work on the Broads, and seen the aerial photographs of our sites after work has been undertaken... a few trampled weeds is nothing! Well worth the temporary loss to get rid of aliens.

It all recovers... hopefully the reed will expand back into the space it may well have originally occupied... more room for warblers.

Тиму
[aka Tim] from within the biblio!

Ken Broadhurst said...

La jussie has pretty much taken over our pond out back. The best you can say about it is that the yellow flowers are pretty.

The pond belongs to the village authorities, and nobody has done anything to clean it out. The jussie got in a few years ago when, during a dry spell, water was hauled up from the Cher to refill the pond.

Susan said...

Ken: Under the EU Fresh Water Directive the authorities (either the commune or the Office Nationale de l'eau et des milieux aquatiques)have to deal with it. It probably has a lower priority than the rivers or an étang in a series, where the weed could spread though. My guess is they will eventually get to it, but maybe Loire et Cher doesn't have the excellent network of river technicians co-ordinating the work like we have in Indre et Loire.

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