PlantHumboldt

PlantHumboldt, 10 months ago to science

A lot of what we do here at Plant Humboldt has nothing to do with cannabis.

This is our lined, rainwater collection, irrigation pond. It's about 500 ft/sq and 16' at the deepest. Floating in the middle is a salvaged standup paddleboard converted into a floating island.

I set it up last August as an experiment. While the plants are growing (see photos from last year's planting time), they aren't thriving. I need to figure out what's going on.

Once I get it dialed in, the plan is to bolt five or six paddleboards together to make a large habitat island that will also support enough root mass below it that it will reduce the nutrient load in the water. Ideally this will reduce the planktonic algae that gives the water its pea soup color.

In the next post, I'll give a little info on why I think the plants aren't doing so well and ask for advice. Any aquatic #biologists who understand #pond chemistry out there?

Hover on alt text in photos for detailed descriptions.

#biology #aquaculture

Five green, 5-gallon plastic buckets. They have been drilled full of 1" diameter holes throughout the sides and bottom. One of the buckets is empty as a demonstration. The other four have been lined with cheap paint strainer liners made of synthetic material. Then they were filled with a mix of red lava rock, clay and potting soil and planted with water plants. The mix is one I came up with my self based on online reading and personal experience with water plants. These species are all what are called "emergent", meaning the "emerge" or grow from shallow water, as opposed to riparian species that grow in soil at the water's edge or others, such as water hyacinths that float freely on the surface. The potting soil provides some nutrients; the lava rock provides some aeration and the clay holds it all together, mimicking wetland mucky soil. I'm thinking I may have used too much clay, but I'll have to experiment to test this. These buckets fit into the holes in the standup paddleboard in the previous photo. In order for water to slosh over the tops of the buckets, the top inch or two has been cut off and the metal handles have been removed.
For more description, see the previous two photos in this post. This is all 8 green, plastic, 5-gallon buckets, drilled full of holes, lined with paint bucket filters, filled with a soil mix and planted with wetland plants. They are sitting on an orange push cart ready to be taken down to the irrigation pond. This is how they looked in August of 2022 when originally planted. They came from a nursery that sells wetland plants and were originally either bare-root or in 1-gallon pots. They are relatively small plants. Compared to the first picture that was taken today, July 8, 2023, they haven't really grown much. I'm still trying to figure out why.