STOP, LOOK, AND LISTEN!

Actually, it’s “stop, test, and apply” when talking about fertilizer. And won’t everyone be talking about fertilizer now that the April snow showers are over?

But, PLEASE, for the sake of Rock Lake, before you apply fertilizer to your lawn, test your soil to see if it needs phosphorus or not. If you are reading this, your lawn is probably in the watershed of the lake, and so any extra phosphorus you put on your grass probably ends up in the lake. And do you know what nasty stuff really loves that phosphorus? Yes, the horrible Eurasian water milfoil, which is the weed that you have been seeing more and more of these past few years. It’s the one that you see in mats on the surface. It’s the one that is too thick underneath to make it good habitat for fish breeding. It’s the one that gets tangled in your motors, in your legs, in your canoe paddles.

So, maybe the problem is not as bad as a train wreck (the avoidance of which was the origin of the “stop, look, and listen” slogan), but it is a growing (no pun intended) problem in Rock Lake. The Rock Lake Improvement Association this year is going to focus on it. Let’s stop the proliferation of Eurasian water milfoil before it wrecks our enjoyment of our aquatic treasure.

Making Waves
April 8, 2003
Johanna Chworowsky