Jute carpet bombing to halt killer life-sucking green aliens

TEAMS have been out recently laying jute carpets on the bed of several stretches of canal close to where I live.

This apparently eccentric activity is an experiment in controlling water weeds.

Water weeds are not easy to control. In the old days they weren’t much of a problem: canals had continuous commercial traffic and the barges did the job of keeping the channels clear. Then boat traffic declined, the level of agricultural nutrients leaching into the water increased and exotic weeds from other countries got into the canals and started to spread explosively.