Derma-Safe is a family owned and operated small business located in Northern NJ and for over 35 years we have been providing products to our military and the survival kit industry. In 1996 we started to work on a problem that has plagued us for decades. The problem was, how to control aquatic weed growth in our own backyard
There are two of us leading this development – Warren, the old one, an M.I.T. engineer and Paul a Northeastern engineer. For Fifty years Warren has lived on freshwater lakes with varying lake weed problems. A number of solutions have been tried including deepening the water, lowering the lake in the fall and holding it down thru deep frost, pulling the weeds by hand and putting down heavier than water sunscreens; a neighbor tried renting a harvester; our current lake has been using chemicals. Truth be told, we were only looking to help ourselves when we started this program, but when a neighbor said to us “Why don’t you have weeds off your property” we explained and he said “You need to sell this…”
If the goal is to provide a summer in which we have weed free swimming and boating, not to mention an area where one can cast a lure without getting hung up on weeds, all these methods mentioned above have been failures. In the late 1990s after spending many thousands of dollars in deepening our waterfront, and still having problem weeds, we embarked on a research and development program culminating in the current iteration of a sunscreen we named The Lake Bottom Blanket. The design target was a device that was inexpensive and could be readily installed by one or two people. This is a device that prevents the sun from stimulating the growth of weeds (flora) but does not interfere with the activities of subsurface creatures (fauna). As such it is not a benthic barrier; it is sunscreen.
The Lake Bottom Blanket is made of inert material and only affects the pond weeds. The same effect could be accomplished by spreading a sun shield on top of the water or putting chemical sun blockers (dyes) in the water which are all effective pond weed control techniques.
We have spent a premium to live directly on the lake shore. Isn’t it worth a few extra dollars to be able to enjoy the water without the obnoxious lake & pond weeds?