Weedkiller and Dirty water trough advice needed!

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Sammii1990x

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Hello,

I was wondering if anybody could help answer a couple of queries that I have, please?

One of the paddocks is literally knee high with weeds in several places and whilst it is being rested at the moment, it is used for a 'starvation' paddock for the chubby ponies when needed. What is the best advice you could give for weed killing, or is literally a case of manually derooting them?

Also,

I did the back-breaking job of emptying, scrubbing and cleaning the water trough. Filled it back up and it looked beautiful and crystal-clear.... but now just a mere 3 weeks later it is green and slimey and really silty again. Is there any supplement/insert I can put in the trough to clear the water... much like in a fish tank??

Many thanks in advance for anybody offering advice :)
 
What sort of weeds are they? If not poisonous I would imagine the fat porkers would do a fine job of taking them down! As for the water, well given what horses drink by choice I don't think I'd worry too much although I always made a habit of cleaning out the tank and refilling it fortnightly anyway.
 
I repeatedly strim my weeds, I try and do it every two weeks at this time of the year.

I just empty and refill my water troughs, will be interested to hear if there is something you can add to the water :)
 
We empty and let troughs refill a minimum of twice a week more often during a hot spell .
Leaving them three weeks is just yucky .
 
Goldenstar said:
We empty and let troughs refill a minimum of twice a week more often during a hot spell .
Leaving them three weeks is just yucky .
Click to expand...

LJR said:
I repeatedly strim my weeds, I try and do it every two weeks at this time of the year.

I just empty and refill my water troughs, will be interested to hear if there is something you can add to the water :)
Click to expand...

I'm going to try and get around to strimming this weekend. I have loads of docks and some blasted stinky yellow stringy stuff - I don't have a clue what it is other than it's not ragwort. Makes me sneeze and the ponies walk round it!
 
Interesting. I clean troughs out about 2-3 times a year. And drain fully and scrub all the sludge out. I think green troughs are often horse’s first choice for drinking. My horses also generally prefer trough water to fresh bucket water. As long as no falling vegetation or blown vegetation gets in troughs, and they have a fair turnover, I don’t think they need cleaning more often. IME the large metal troughs develop an ecosystem of their own. I don’t know if smaller troughs are different? As long as water smells and looks ok, and the horses are happy drinking it. I think it is when fields are rested a long time, and the water isn’t being turned over that the troughs seems to go stagnant. I always clean troughs when moving to a rested field.
 
I have to clean mine every two to three weeks - we have some crows who have learnt that dunking hard bread makes it easier to eat, trouble is they're not smart enough to have worked out that it doesn't work with bits of old dead rabbit, and they just drop those into the water and don't bother fishing them out again when they don't go soft. If I spot that they've been dunking it gets cleaned and emptied there and then. If it's just bread bits left behind I get them out with a kiddies fishing net.
 
Thank you all for your replies, it's greatly appreciated! It's a solid water trough with an automatic filler, we then feed the hose pipe from the trough to fill up the buckets in the individual paddocks. The water that comes directly from the source through the hose pipe is crystal clear, as is the water that we bucket out of the trough however the sides of the trough just get caked in a green slime that does not look attractive!

The trough is in the same paddock that is overrun with weeds so isn't used directly for water source very often.

With regards to the weeds I was thinking about strimming them however I wasn't sure if they would then grow back quicker and thicker (abit like when we shave our legs?? :D:D)
 
wingedhorse99 said:
Interesting. I clean troughs out about 2-3 times a year. And drain fully and scrub all the sludge out. I think green troughs are often horse’s first choice for drinking. My horses also generally prefer trough water to fresh bucket water. As long as no falling vegetation or blown vegetation gets in troughs, and they have a fair turnover, I don’t think they need cleaning more often. IME the large metal troughs develop an ecosystem of their own. I don’t know if smaller troughs are different? As long as water smells and looks ok, and the horses are happy drinking it. I think it is when fields are rested a long time, and the water isn’t being turned over that the troughs seems to go stagnant. I always clean troughs when moving to a rested field.
Click to expand...

Mine is the same, she makes a bee line for the green slimy trough. It was emptied an cleaned when we moved to this field (April) but has quickly regrown.
It can't be too nasty as it has water boatmen living in it!
 
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