permaculture

[Koreen Brennan <koreenbrennan@gmail.com>]

I hear you Lawrence. We try to cover aquaculture in the class before we
visit the site so the students have that perspective. Nice pond photos! And
interesting article.

As an interesting aside, it is illegal to transport water hyacinth in
Florida. It's so incredibly invasive here it clogs entire waterways so
nothing can get through. It LOVES Florida. After I discovered that it has
at least 22 economic uses, I explained this to some state people who pay
millions to eradicate it. One of them was a private contractor who cleans
it up for the state whose lightbulbs were going off; he could see the
advantage of harvesting and selling it rather than trying to commit
genocide on it.

The site has concrete basins where the rainwater ends up, and then it goes
into the wetlands/pond on an overflow.They could put appropriate plants in
the basins and it would be a lot prettier and more fun, as well as more
functional.

I like their rain chains that catch the water on the way down from the
roof. I would love to make some of those with repurposed material. I just
would have designed the whole thing a lot differently.

They do have some nice water catchment off the parking lot into sunken
medians that absorb it. They have other features that are nice too. It was
disappointing, when I first went there, to see how much they didn't do that
they could have done. I understand there may have been regulatory and other
barriers that no one wanted to mess with and the client may have had
requirements too that limited what they could do.

Nice photo of chinampas! We use chinampas or a modification a lot in
Florida, really works great here. You just gave me the idea of adding one
or two to our pond - dont' know why I didn't think of that...We just
installed a small pond in our yard with lilies, papyrus, duckweed, native
iris and some water hyacinth somehow got in there (:-0)  - we're going to
add azolla and some edibles. We also are blessed, in Florida, with super
hardy native gambusia or mosquito fish. We have them plus goldfish plus
tons of frogs that showed up plus *hot pink* dragon flies!  I kid you not!
They showed up the first day after the pond had water. And electric blue
and pure black ones. I love ponds!  We plan to add a flow form catching
rain off the roof, going through a small wetlands to clean it, then into
the pond - the spillway leads to some bananas.

We talked about putting some larger native fish in there but there are tons
of water birds in the neighborhood; not sure I want to fight that fight.

Koreen
www.growpermaculture.com

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 8:34 AM, Koreen Brennan <koreenbrennan@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > They did plant some wetland plants though, and got some
> > points for that. They put chlorine in the pond water to keep the algae
> out
> > though, lol.
> >
>
> A catchment pond can easily remediate excess nutrients. They are working
> backward putting chlorine in the water.
> Algae are Nature's response to unnatural levels of nutrients in water, i.e.
> nitrogen. The way it is done is to plant the water, the soil in the pond
> and the soil around the pond, the shore/beach, embankments and adjoining
> watershed. Required plantings include duckweed, water lillies, cattails,
> papyrus, limited aquatic plants (do not remember names but some are used in
> aquariums) and in warm climates water hyacinth and other floating plants.
> These plant communities become self sustaining and to a degree self
> regulating. They provide habitat, breeding grounds and food for many
> marine, aquatic and land based creatures. Mosquito control is always a
> benefit from a balanced pond ecosystem, birds, dragonflies and bats
> accomplish this. Lose the chlorine and bring in the duckweed and cattails,
> and algae! In a balanced diverse aquatic system algae does not last long as
> it becomes food for other creatures and eventually plants; duckweed
> outcompetes it for space and light. This scenario happens even during
> loading of fresh nutrients, sometimes in large quantities, from adjoining
> watersheds, ditches draining fields, pastures with livestock manure. Living
> floating islands and chinampas can add significantly to remediation of
> nutrient rich water flowing into the pond.
>
> Volvox, one of the seven wonders of the micro world
>
> http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artdec03/volvox.html
>
> *Volvox* is a Chlorophyte, or green alga. It exists as a grand spherical
> colony. Each little alga within the colony bears two flagella, whip-like
> hairs. The individual alga are connected to each other by thin strands of
> cytoplasm that enable the whole colony to swim in a coordinated fashion.
> The individual alga also have small red eye spots.
>
> The colonies even have what we could call a front and rear end. Or, since
> Volvox resembles a little planet, a 'north and south pole'. In the northern
> region the eyespots are more developed. This helps the colony to swim
> towards the light. This differentiation of cells make *Volvox* quite
> unique. It is a colony that comes really close to being a multi-celled
> organism.
>
> Watching groups of colonies under the light microscope is a breathtaking
> sight. If you leave enough space under the cover slip (with the aid of
> spots of Vaseline under the corners) the spheres will swim slowly towards
> the light of the microscope, (use dark field illumination!).
>
> *Volvox* can be found relatively easy. They need quite clean nutrient rich
> water (Eutrophic) and it has to be warm so summer is the time of the year
> for a good *Volvox* catch. The best thing to do is to use a plankton net
> but if you are lucky you can also find them by squeezing pond scum. In a
> jar of pond water they will swim towards the light so they are often easy
> to find near the surface.
>
> <> - LL
>
> One of my ponds:
>
>
> ​
>
>
> ​
>
> This is the aquarium aquatic plant I referred to above growing with
> duckweed in a small pool I built
>
> Same pool as above which was close up picture.
>
> Cattails and duckweed in same pond with water lillies.
>
> Water hyacinth in a lake in China
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Lawrence F. London
> lfljvenaura@gmail.com
> https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared/
>
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