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
Well, to get to 10% coverage on this pond, we would need 700 of these islands (assuming they were all the same size), which would mean we needed to prep around 37,000 plants every winter to install every spring.
We’ll probably shoot for a more realistic target to start with.
Zounds!!
Would native riparian plants planted directly into the pond be an option?