Yep, We Burned our Pond to Fix It (Year 2)

buddy here we go oh thank you what are you guys doing we were mushroom hunting all right so last year we had some fun burning the the cat tails and the weeds the overgrown grass that were all around our pond and we already started a little early this year we started in the late fall early winter taking care of the biggest side the biggest problem over there all right so we're doing round two of burning down by our pond we did this in the spring right before all the new Cattails came up and worked really well for about two weeks oh here we go here we go come on corn dogs no see he thinks we're burning corn dogs sorry buddy we're not gonna eat the corn dogs we gotta burn them we had a lot of good questions from our video last week hey isn't it just gonna grow in worse than it did the year before by burning it aren't you gonna ruin the the wildlife atmosphere around your pond and is it really going to take care of the problem long term by Bernie these are some great questions that we're gonna talk about today but we are going to do it again because we really like the results that we had last year here's some of the Cattails coming back so you can kind of pull them out I can dig under there and get the root of it that'll keep them from those from at least coming back but we've got a lot of it over here we've had problems with muskrats that we're dealing with there's a number of issues down here that we're going to clean up but the biggest issue is keeping us from the pond to be able to use it is all this growth and that's what we're going to deal with here can you can you pull my hand okay you got a stuck boot cool it's really stuck in here so we're in the stone business here hello muddy there bud all right so winds are just under 10 miles an hour so they're just very light which is good for us so they don't have any trees or wooded areas around it's a little ways away so we don't have an issue of it spreading last year it stopped as soon as it hit the green grass it all it stopped so let's get this party started [Music] this stuff spreads quick ooh the Heat [Music] my goodness the Heat this puts off immediately is insane it's the biggest corner of all the the weeds and the cattails so it's going to get pretty big along here and then we've got some other little smaller areas [Music] all right so we've got a good start so far the corner is almost through and then there's a big stretch here this whole south side of the the pond the growth so hot so it's got a little bit of a slow spot there and then it's really going to start to catch in this next little bit here as it starts to burn everything that's been matted down over the winter [Music] oh man oh look at it going so the Corner's done that caught on quick and now it's into the the Big Stretch here on the south side about halfway down now we do have the duct at the very end but the weeds and The Cattails end before them so we've got to make sure that it stops and it doesn't catch anything else on fire but I think they should be all right and one of our goals of doing this is to help the Ducks because some of the Predators at night the coyotes and things that have been hunting our ducks they use all of the the overgrowth here as coverage to hide behind and so this will help give them a better Viewpoint to be able to get away from them if we do have them out on the pond throughout the summer so you can see it's pretty much stopping right here at the grass right as the flame is hitting the green grass it burns it a little but it pretty much puts an end to it so it's really just the the old dry grass that it burns [Music] say goodbye to the cattails [Music] oh ouch hot it's getting pretty hot I got tears coming down my face oh every once in a while the Flames will the heat from the Flames will hit your face and oh it's a heat like I've never felt before oh shoot so this is what I was hoping would happen this is right the edge before well it's not the duck area but it's their their walk down to the pond and so it about hit this fence and kind of melted it a little bit but not bad the Ducks are back here a little ways so as long as this area stops here then we can start the we can clean out the area over there but what I'm seeing is exactly what I want to see which is that it's there's no big growth right here we've kept this pretty mowed and trimmed down and so it's able to stop right here on the edge so make sure this is done and then we'll go start the other half of the pond that's where we've got a lot of the the trees on the edge all right we're ready to start the second side here this will get going pretty quick [Music] a big mixture of cat tails trees and while these trees May somewhat burn in here they're just going to burn a little bit we're gonna have to cut them out it's gonna be really tough we've had a hard time keeping them from coming back from year to year so we'll have to trim them down and see if there's some way we can keep these trees from damaging the this is the dam on the on the pond so we don't want it to destroy if it gets down in there and a big tree grows it'll start causing more leaking than we already have on the pond and we don't want that so these trees we're gonna have to cut out we cut these trees out completely last year not completely we couldn't get the roots out but we cut these trees down to the ground and they still came back in there eight to ten feet tall some of these this area is we've got some new growth of cattails that we need to dig out and spray but right here we've got a big area to burn so let's get that started foreign [Music] [Music] one is you know what about the wildlife anything that's out here is really just birds that will nest in these and we do have some nearby ponds if they really need something immediately but you can already see new growth you can already see new growth up there that's been unaffected by this now we're not going to let it stay but if we don't do anything over the next two weeks those will be tall and they'll already be able to use those but that's not our goal our goal is for for us to use our pond to fish to swim to enjoy and so it makes it very difficult when there's a ton of growth around the pond to be able to enjoy it ourselves and so while yes we would love to have I know people will say oh the cat tails will help clean the pond we still have a lot of moss a lot of overgrowth even with all the Cattails that we've had over the past few years and so I don't really see the benefit to The Cattails being here at all that you really can't sell me on that idea and some people say you can eat them you can you can cook them up and so that I'll usually say list of these do not look good 100 percent we have we have plenty of food we grow a lot of our own food and I don't need to eat cat tails so that's often a weird statement or idea is to eat Cattails I don't if you guys eat it great more power to you but not really that interested in it it's pretty disgusting so we're gonna finish up the burn and then we'll come back in here in a few hours we'll start to trim the trees and mow and get this place all cleaned up so we can enjoy it for some fishing tonight you want your sweatshirt on there you go babe you caught anything yet one fish what'd you catch bigger little fish little Bass catch anything yet no okay right [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] for us we've got some Cattails over here that we have liquid that's just for them that's supposed to be absorbed into them and hopefully we'll keep them from coming back and then Becky and I are going to trim all these trees along here and then start to get it all smoothed out here so we can actually enjoy all this space foreign [Music] working on all these roots for the the trees that we keep seeing come back every year and this is what we're trying to do is improve this from year to year get a little smarter about what's going on out here figure out how to stop some of this overgrowth from happening and these trees are like one long root system that are coming along here and so I'm digging up the big parts hopefully separating the root system like dividing it and putting an end to it somewhere it may still grow from the start and there's a long it's like a 30 foot area but every 10 feet or so there's a big bundle of root so we can figure out a way to put an end to this so we don't have to deal with this year after year oh big bundle of roots oh God so we did some trimming for the next couple hours and now everything is done here is some footage from last year to compare while the water level did go down quite a bit over the past year because of how dry it was last year you can see how The Cattails were much less overgrown and especially on the west side of the pond there was so much less overgrowth in the pond itself and while the Moss is back this year it's not nearly as bad as it was last year now it's time to enjoy some fishing a small fish a little one yeah all right let's in the back did you catch a big one whoa how big is it 1.9 wow jab Uriah big one we're eating good tonight so we've had a long day of working out here and it has just about wrapped up it's looking great we can access the whole Pond now and all the boys are fishing out here see if we can catch some dinner [Music] whoa it's another huge one [Music] wow looks like another one and a half almost two pounder whoo pretty fish [Music] oh [Music] got a big one at the end of the night how much is it 2.30 pounds that's right oh biggest one we've caught yet [Music] so we cooked up the fish the boys caught from our pond oh man that looks amazing who wants to take the first bite me grab a bite let us know how it tastes foreign [Music] do you like the fish it's so good

Channel: White House on the Hill

Views: 149,052

Keywords: White House on the Hill, pond, cattails

Id: RhhIx8f4OeI

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023