What an unusual and fun plant is duckweed.  We found out from a friend that koi love to eat it, so we drove to local ponds and harvested some to feed them.  They ate a LOT! We had to make a couple of trips a month in the warmest weather.

I was able to winter some duckweed over in the greenhouse last year in a dormant state and the plants leafed out in a bucket in the spring and then provided all the duckweed the koi could ever want through the summer.  This plant is very prolific!

The lifecycle of this plant is fascinating. They have tiny flowers that humans rarely see, but that are visited by flies, mites, small spiders, and even bees. But they can also be pollinated just by bumping into each other on a windy day. Duckweed’s most common propagation technique is to form new chains of plants-and they are so prolific that scientists are find ways to use them to remediate polluted bodies of water and also to grow medicines, like synthetic insulin. And they can also produce “turions”–special buds that drop to the pond’s bottom, overwinter there, and then float back to the top and leaf out into duckweed plants.

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Future plans for this plant are to move the full bucket of plantlets to the greenhouse and hope they winter over again so we have readily available fresh salads for the koi come late spring.