Floating Island Garden
Floating Island Garden
Our retention pond in our neighborhood has a lot of algae and problematic plant growth due to the surrounding farms and lawn runoff, so we're experimenting with a floating island to pull nutrients out before they can cause problems. This will also provide some interesting flowering plants, and more fish habitats.
Will be an interesting experiment to see what survives and what does poorly.
Zinnias, sunflowers, marigolds, and a few others are in net pots, inserted into cutouts in EVA foam mats.
Design is from:
http://www.beemats.com/
More reading:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/flowers-grown-floating-on-polluted-waterways-can-help-clean-up-nutrient-runoff/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666765723000637?via%3Dihub
What a great idea! I'm curious to see how this goes. Would you be open to cross-posting this to the solarpunk farming community? [email protected]
Done
If you ever want to try creating your own floating mat, this guy goes through the steps that worked for him: https://howtorewild.co.uk/actions/build-a-floating-bog/
Love that it's not a YouTube video. Someone needs to fix an AI that scrubs YouTube tutorials and makes text and image versions. 😐
Thanks for this! I may try this on my pond
Very interesting project, I'm curious if this one ends up being more cost effective at scale due to the difference in planting styles.
Aquaponics with less steps 😜
Not less steps; this is the OG aquaponics method and has been around for hundreds of years. Everything else is just refining for efficiency and space limitations.
https://www.milkwood.net/2014/01/20/aquaponics-a-brief-history/
Less steps the humans have to take. Cool link I'm pretty versed in Choctaw agriculture 😁
Wow that’s fascinating! How will you know if it’s working? Will you do lab samples?
For this year, we're only interested in seeing how the island looks, and if the plants can thrive with low effort.
Next year, if all goes well, we'll add a lot more islands and do water testing.
I don't expect a significant impact to water quality with a single mat.
Oh, I love this. Keep us updated!
The rain makes the scene particularly beautiful.
I Would Like to Know More
What a fascinating idea!
Iirc, there is some plants that are better at pulling the crap out of soil, should be the same for water. So maybe research some of those for options?
I’ve read cannabis/hemp can be grown to remediate some places.
I’ll give the links a read when I get time later, thanks growmie.
Love it, but we're not as concerned about metals or toxins as we are about excess nutrients.
The papers I listed have plants that they've been using for their remediation, and we're following those lists. I know some of the researchers on those projects, and we'll modify our plant list based on any changes in their recommendations.
Yep, hemp has been long known to rejuvenate soil. It's been used for decades (or more) as a rotation crop to restore soil after something like corn or wheat sucks up all of the nutrients.
Regenerative crops pull nutrients out of the air so they go into the soil, which is the opposite of what our intent is here.