Hello all. Upstream of me is a huge City (about 400Km) where God knows what gets dumped into the river, then several farm holdings where bad practice has resulted in all the soil getting swept into the river, then much nearer (about 40 K) is a huge sisal plantation whose favourite past time seems to be dumping waste into the river. Granted by the time the river gets to my farm dilution and natural processes of attrition would have dealt with most of the toxins, I however have a lot of turbid water (the kind that never clears even when left to sit still for months on end. ) Is there anyone with a possible design for this. My land is such that I can syphon the water to where Im putting the main lake (about 50 acre lake), or syphon to a temp place, pump it to the highest point in the farm and somehow do a multi step filtration process. I would really like to keep human edible fish at the lake and don't mind suggestions on how to design a system to do this efficiently, and naturally. Been reading about reed bed filtration but for sewerage treatment plants, not sure how that fares on the silt / suspended clay front. (My water is literally brown). ok, imma stop rumbling.
Vetiver will suit your climate. You can run floating rafts on your water for nutrient removal, hedgerows of Vetiver filtering inflows. Pumping it around may be prohibitive. https://www.vetiver.org/g/contaminated-water.htm
awesome! Now to look for seeds or cuttings. It seems reproduction is asexual, so most likely will have to look for it where it is already growing. It indeed does look like an awesome solution to filtration, and I can see a 100 meter channel of rocks and the grass, preceeded by a simple sand filter. (course => medium=> fine => vetiver bed => final sedimentation area => storage.
You could do most of it with hedgerows, silt will settle on each stage. Vetiver is planted as the 'Vetiver System', tight hedgerows. Veriver.org will have distributors for somewhere close.
Maybe you should have the water tested just to be sure there aren't some really long-lived toxins in it. You will want to know specifics in order to know how long to keep the water in the filtration system before using it. A good natural filtration system can be done with cattails. There are small versions of greywater reed bed filtration systems using gravel and cattails. I read an article about using peat and spagnum moss as part of the filtering, but both of those are limited resources, but give an idea of how plants can help clean up water. Also look up bioremediation with plants. Those are some terms you can search on, YouTube is a good source.