Good grey water filtering plants

Steven hartsentwine.australia@gmail.com
Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:12:12 PST
Hi, if my 14 species of frogs are anything to go on, in my recycled grey water pond, than I have to say yes, it works !
 My grey water goes through a soil & gravel bed first, then through a shallow sedge pond 5m long x 300mm deep. I have crinums mixed with bog reads. The reads do most of the clean up work, due to their thick growth habit. The crinums will cleanse too, especially if allowed to multiply, but they produce beautiful flowers & provided the water is partly filtered by the time the crinums soak it up, yes they are more than hardy enough to take extreme punishment. My crinums never die back in the pond, in fact when the reads die back in the cold of winter in the mountains, the crinums are often left standing alone for a while. 

The frogs love it & breed successfully year after year, it's a healthy population & zero deformities & no frog virus problems, plenty of little fish turned up mysteriously too  : )

Hope that inspires you heaps !
Steven

Sent from my iPhone

On 12/11/2011, at 3:22 PM, Lee Poulsen <wpoulsen@pacbell.net> wrote:

> I recently received a Facebook email from someone I don't know who found me while perusing the PBS wiki. (I live close to her, so she contacted me.) She doesn't belong to the list (and didn't even know what it was) so I told her I would ask and see what all the experts here might suggest. Here is her question:
> 
> "We are putting in a grey water system and we want a reed bed to filter the water. However, I don't want invasive reeds in my garden and I read that another choice might be Crinum Lillies i.e. Hymenocallis Occidentalis, Crinum Americanum as well as a couple of Iris species. As an expert, I wonder if you know where to buy any of these plants?"
> 
> First I told her I wasn't an expert. ;-)
> Then I mentioned that there are probably a lot more choices of Crinums, Hymenocallis, and both Iris species as well as Iris hybrids (such as the Louisiana and Japanese Iris hybrids and relatives) that she might really like to try. 
> 
> I have no clue as to which are good water filtering plants however. Or if there are other genera that might be good for this, including non-bulbous plants, that also aren't invasive. I'm hoping that there are some good plants that are both good at filtering water AND have amazing flowers, etc. She lives on the side of one of the hills near downtown L.A. which has an extremely mild climate (virtually never reaches 0°C and rarely gets very hot either).
> 
> Any ideas from the experts out there?
> --Lee Poulsen
> Pasadena, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a
> Latitude 34°N, Altitude 1150 ft/350 m
> 
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