Silkweed [TOP]
Asclepias syriaca, commonly called common milkweed, butterfly flower, silkweed, silky swallow-wort, and Virginia silkweed, is a species of flowering plant.[1][2] It is native to southern Canada and much of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, excluding the drier parts of the prairies.[3] It is in the genus Asclepias, the milkweeds. It grows in sandy soils as well as other kinds of soils in sunny areas.
silkweed
The various preparations you can buy to reduce or kill silkweed provide only a temporary solution. Most will require repeated treatments, making them an expensive option. As always when using chemicals, getting the dosage right is essential. Few ponds are a regular shape and the correct dose is based on calculating the precise volume of water in the pond. Working out the right amount of chemical to use for your pond can be very difficult. If you underestimate the dose the treatment will have little or no effect, but if you overdose you will damage or even kill other plants, another expensive mistake!
As vegetation starts to grow, fishing in a lake filled with weeds can turn out to be a horrendous experience, especially for a novice angler. Even some experienced anglers still find fishing in this condition frustrating. Due to the inevitable growing vegetation, it is quite certain that at some point of the year or season, most lakes or rivers will be filled with silkweed thus making fishing a hard task. Anglers who are faced with this condition while fishing often try to find clear regions to present their baits so as to make the fishing process much easier.
Baits presented on the clear region stimulates suspicion straightaway. It is where these carp fishes are expecting to find a trap and it is very hard to hide your tackle when fishing into a hole in the silkweed, as the silkweed closest to you are tight lining to the lead, including the bait, in an area where the carp fish will be slightly more cautious. This is certainly not an ideal situation.
Another way in which you can effectively fish for carps in silkweed, is by ensuring that the tip of your rod is as high as possible, so that a little amount of line is in contact with the water, thereby avoiding contact with the silkweed. You should also ensure that you make use of a semi slack line so that the bobbins sit at half-mast. Tight lines through silkweed makes a tram line flat and it gives the carp an ideal foresight of the areas it should avoid.
When fishing for carps in a silkweed, you want to be very sure that you are targeting the right areas of the silkweed, to start with. Focusing on silkweed that are gradually dying off will prove much less yielding than targeting silkweed that are still fresh and providing a high-level buffet for the carp to actively feed on. Go after weeds that are alive, fresh looking, and light green for a general success of catching carp in the weed.
If you are carp fishing in shallow bottom that have silkweed present, you should have the chance to effectively scout and stalk the carp fish with a little more ease before drafting out a game plan. This will provide you with the perfect opportunity to plan at what rig, and hook bait you would likely go with.
To make easy your task of locating carp fish in a lake or river filled with silkweed, you can utilize a good fish finder. This tool is capable of locating fish underwater by probing pulses of sound energy, that is, sonar.
How exactly do you present your rigs and bait to the carp fish over silkweed or in the silkweed? This is maybe the most daunting part of the whole process. Learning how best to place and present the bait is going to be a challenging task, especially in your first two attempts. Chumming and pre-baiting are highly recommended methods. You can also make use of a fish XXL spray, which is a fish attractant. This attractant will get the carp fishes actively feeling like it is in a safe fishing area. Doing this will provide you with the perfect opportunity to start your personal construction project of the silkweed region. If you have a 3-4-day period of chumming and pre-baiting, the carp fish will act like bulldozers and will naturally start clearing the runway for you.
If you are a professional carp angler, you will understand that there exist a huge difference in when carp fishing is at highest levels, and when it tends to reduce. You are going to observe a few of the same trends with carp fishing in any form of weed or weeded beds. When it is summer or spring time, you are going to observe that the carp are drawn to the silkweed and will flock around these areas continuously. There are huge levels of oxygen during months like this, ultimately offering the carps with exactly what it wants.
At night time, it is going to be contrary. This is when the carp will migrate from the silkweed and move out into the water. Oxygen levels are no longer at its peak during this period, thus making it crucial that the craps migrate. Bottom carp fishing can be quite effective after sunset.
In summary, as a carp angler, you need to stop worrying about actively targeting these areas. It takes few practice and a little bit of learning to develop, but if you are carp fishing during the appropriate time of the day, and you carefully choose how you present your bait, you may have your best carp fishing trip to date, just by approaching these silkweed with more confidence.
The carp spawning season which takes place in April, can also provide you with the best opportunity to reel in these fishes. As an angler, it is recommended that you go after post-spawn carps because they are much easier to catch even in the silkweed than the pre-spawn carps.
Fishing in silkweed can be fun with the right knowledge and fishing gear. Of course, you will encounter several obstacles in the form of the silkweed, and reeling in adamant and battling carps, but with the right level of persistence, focus, and confidence, you will certainly breakthrough and record a significant yield.
Anyway back to the presenting of baits in silkweed. There are two simple rules I apply. The first is to avoid any stiff link type materials as the presentations generally look awful if you go to the trouble of having a look. I much prefer to use either a soft braid or simple monofilament in normal breaking strains. The mono often stands out far less visibly than braid and as silkweed generally grows best in clear water this is something to bear in mind. If conditions allow try a simple 8, 10 or 12lb nylon hook link. You may get a pleasant surprise how many bonus takes you get.
The other thing I do is use barbless hooks in silkweed. I have written about this subject in the magazines before but three different correspondences over these past couple of weeks have prompted me to put a few thoughts back down on paper thus this Blog.
Quite simply a barbed hook fished in silkweed makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for a carp to actually get a bait and hook into their mouth. Hardly an ideal scenario when you need them to do this as easily as possible to stand a chance of catching them.
If you are suffering a lot of hook pulls it is possibly simply a case of you making it difficult for the carp to actually take the hook bait. Next time you wind in a ball of silkweed drop it back in the margins then drop your rig amongst it. Next simulate a carp over it. Remember when a carp wants to stop swimming they have to back pedal their pectoral fins. The larger the carp the more water movement they create. Now try and pick that bait up and nine times out of ten the barb will be stuck in the weed hindering the free movement of the bait.
Now I know there are often clear areas amongst the silkweed but these in my mind have already been cleared of a lot of the natural food and to try and land the hook bait on them can lead to a lot of swim disturbance through re-casting.
But what of this milky plant on which the monarch dines almost exclusively, which so imbues the monarch larvae with its acrid taste that no bird will attempt to eat it? It has a more elegant name -- silkweed. But nature isn't soft; it decrees that bees are not welcome here. They're trespassers on what is exclusively the butterflies' preserve. (Those that push a welcome are likely to get their feet tangled up in the pollen masses or fissures of the flower's corona.)
Lugd. Bat. 1735, pt. 1:43). See also Irby and Mangles (Travels, ch. viii). Hasselquist, however, finds the "apples of Sodom" in the Solanum Sodomeum, which he identifies with the Solanum melongena, or mad- apple, growing in great abundance in the plain of the Jordan (Riese, p. 151). But Dr. Robinson thinks the other the most probable plant. His description of it is as follows: "We saw here [on the shore of the Dead Sea] several trees of the kind, the trunks of which were 6 or 8 inches in diameter, and the whole height from 10 to 15 feet. It has a grayish, cork- like bark, with long oval leaves, and in its general appearance and character it might be taken for a gigantic perennial species of the milk-weed or silkweed found in the northern parts of the American states. Its leaves and flowers are very similar to those of the latter plant, and when broken off it in like manner discharges copiously a milky fluid. The fruit greatly resembles externally a large smooth apple or orange, hanging in clusters of three or four together, and when ripe is of a yellow color. It was now fair and delicious to the eye, and soft to the touch; but on being pressed or struck it explodes with a puff, like, a bladder or puff-ball, leaving in the hand only the shreds of the thin rind and a few fibres. It is, indeed, filled chiefly with air like a bladder, which gives it the round form; while in the center a small slender pod runs through it from the stem, and is connected by thin filaments with the rind. The pod contains a small quantity of fine silk with seeds, precisely like the pod of the silk-weed, though very much smaller, being indeed scarcely the tenth part as large. The Arabs collect the silk and twist it into matches for their guns, preferring it to the common match, because it requires no sulphur to render it combustible. In the accounts of Tacitus and Josephus, after a due allowance for the marvelous in all popular reports, I find nothing which does not apply almost literally to the fruit of the Osher, as we saw it. It must be plucked and handled with great care in order to preserve it from bursting. We attempted to carry some of the boughs and fruit with us to Jerusalem, but without success. Hasselquist's apples of Sodom (the fruit of the Solanum melongena) are much smaller than those of the Osher, and when ripe are full of small black grains. There is here, however, nothing like explosion, nothing like 'smoke and ashes,' except occasionally, as the same naturalist remarks, 'when the fruit is punctured by an insect (Tenthredo), which converts the whole of the inside into dust, leaving nothing but the rind entire, without any loss of color.' We saw the Solanum and the Osher growing side by side; the former presenting nothing remarkable in its appearance, and being found in other parts of the country, while the latter immediately arrested our attention by its singular accordance with the ancient story, and is, moreover, peculiar in Palestine to the shores of the Dead Sea" (Bib. Researches, 2, 236 sq.; comp. Wilson, Bible Lands, 1, 8 sq.). SEE SODOM. 041b061a72