Duckweed! After all the rain this spring, all my cattle tub containers filled up with water. They are usually traps for leaf debris and because I use them to soak hanging baskets they tend to have some leached nutrients from those. The result is sort of rich standing water that's perfect for breeding mosquitoes (a crop for the nesting swallows
) and growing some algae if it stands too long. A first this year was that a few of them developed a crop of duckweed. I think duckweed is a cool and interesting plant and you should read the Wikipedia article on it if you are interested in odd plants. Anyway, I thought I'd like to let it grow in the stock troughs where the goldfish live and discovered that's not going to work at all. They eat it as fast as they eat fish flakes. So I decided to grow some of my own fish food and started transferring it to a single tub with the idea of growing it. So far so good. These are tiny plants, but one container is growing an ultra tiny species - no bigger than the head of a straight pin. You can see the difference in the photo after I first moved it, but the colonies mix together so it would take a better photographer than me to photograph it now. The regular duckweed looks gigantic next to it. As the weather heats up, the water in the containers is being used up so the original source will be gone soon, but this one is now dedicated to duckweed. Wonder what happens to it in the winter months? Will it return?