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
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. ๐
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.