Eco-Harvester Launches for the Season

We are initiating and will continue this bi-weekly blog during the summer to keep our members fully informed about our CLPO projects aimed at serving the interests of our members – and to urgently request your volunteer time to help us do more.

Our reporting to you will dwell on the results of our first full year of harvesting the invasive vegetation in Clear Lake with the Eco-Harvester machine we acquired last year.

The weeds we all currently see at the surface around the entire perimeter of the lake is curlyleaf pondweed (CLP), the nasty vegetation that begins growing under the ice and comes to the surface each year in April. It is the current target of our harvesting operations.

As you consider the enormity our task of harvesting CLP you will understand our need for additional volunteers to help us. The DNR has been very supportive of our non-chemical mechanical control of CLP. But we do have a problem.

We can harvest only the amount of CLP based the number or our members willing to volunteer to help us operate the machine and dispose of the tons of vegetation collected in the harvester and then dumped to an on-shore trailer for delivery at our disposal off-lake.

If you are looking out on the lake at a band of weeds in front of your property, please know that our harvesting priority is to maintain access to the outer body of the lake for all property owners and to do more as our volunteer force is increased.

In this first full year of mechanical harvesting it is impossible to remove all CLP from Clear Lake, but we are committed to creating openings in areas all around the lake so that we can all get our boats beyond the weeds. We can harvest only beyond 150 feet from shore.

We chose to do this on our own rather than to petition the government agency of jurisdiction to levy taxes and hire professionals to operate our harvester machine.