General Pond Stuff

We received a really good question the other day concerning the use of hydrogen peroxide H202, and it’s use in ponds and water gardens.  Specifically, what about using the drug store liquid peroxide that you normally would use to disinfect scratches and scrapes.  So here’s a video that covers the various uses of hydrogen peroxide in ponds.

Long before any commercial products came on the market that contained peroxide, I suspect any good do-it-yourself loving pond owner would have probably tried it for algae control.

You gotta love the open minded experimentors of this world…they move us forward.

With that said, I generally don’t recommend using store bought H202 simply because I try to error widely on the side of caution with such things. First of all, the normal 3% solution is pretty light weight and may not do very much to help with algae. Secondly, a lot of this stuff isn’t just hydrogen peroxide and some will contain stabilizers and additives that I don’t want in my pond.

So that leaves a couple of options.

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Over the years I haven’t had too many problems with insects. I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy. But in the last two years I’ve seemingly become a pin cushion for wasps.

Two years ago it was on the ankle, last year on the forearm, and in both cases, they hurt like hell and become so swollen to become worrisome. It kind of makes you not love nature so much at times like this.

This season I’ve kind of taken a new approach on wasps, mosquitoes, and other flying insects that bug me. We set up a device called the DynaTrap insect trap both in the shop, and out back of the house, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well they’re working.

The DynaTrap is a bit different than most bug stoppers. It doesn’t zap, doesn’t use chemicals (and eliminated my need to use wasp killing sprays), and is devoid of sticky things. What it does use is a specially designed bulb that attracts the insects to the device. As they fly nearby, a built in fan sucks them into a catch basin at the bottom. Once trapped they can’t feed or get out and will die off fairly quickly.

The DynaTrap is particularly effective on wasps, mosquitoes, moths, biting flies, asian beetles, hornets, and yellow jackets,and no-see-ums. And as I mentioned before, we used the DT1000 inside and it’s worked great. If a wasp or moth comes in (our shop doors are often open during the summer) then they don’t last very long before getting trapped.

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