I was checking one of the streams down by the forest at school, testing the health of the water. What I found was that the stream is quite high in nitrate, the natural compound that supports plants, and is sprayed over fields in the form of fertiliser! this wasn’t a huge surprise, as I know that this river flows down from a fish pond upstream.
Nitrate is super nutritious, a combination of nitrogen and oxygen that serve as the major source of food for plant life, although, in high quantities, it can lead to explosions in algae who also consume nitrate. These explosions are called algal blooms, and they can devastate waterways through eutrophication, when, having dominated the river off of a nitrate spike, the algae consumes all the oxygen in the water, suffocating other plants, fish, and bacteria. In order to prevent this happening in my river here, I need to sequester nitrate from the water. One way of doing this is to dramatically increase the plant life, and that is path I’m taking here.
I have dug out a channel around a low lying area, ensuring water flow and access ideal for herb growing, and planted watercress and parsley. This is just the beginning of aquaponically transforming this river!
