My Greywater Oasis: Two Years Later

Check out that lush spectacle.

Back in January of 2013, I launched an experiment in which I ran the drain from my kitchen sink out into a bed of mulch planted with bananas, malanga and papyrus. It’s along my south wall at the end of my impossibly tropical Miami Garden.

It looked like this two years ago:

That image is from this update I posted almost exactly two years ago.

The bananas are incredible now. Last year they bore us six hands of bananas – and I expect at least that many this year.

The book that inspired me was this one:

Definitely worth buying if you’d like to reuse some of the water in your house rather than letting it go to waste (If you buy a copy, use one of my links and I’ll make a buck or two).

I do have to make sure we don’t dump anything too crazy down the kitchen sink, like salty pickle brine or heavy water from the reactor; but, that small limitation aside, pretty much everything else including bits of food scraps and a limited amount of dish soap seems to have no ill effect on the trees.

In fact, they’re flying. I mean, look again!

We’ve got two hands of bananas forming right now – here’s one of them:

They’re Orinoco bananas, a cold-hardier type with fruit that functions excellently as a cooked plantain and decently as a fresh eating banana when fully ripe.

Last week I set up a little cast iron table and two chairs out there on the patio I built from reclaimed bricks. My wife and I have lately been enjoying our breakfast beneath the towering bananas.

Food and beauty from a sink drain… who would have thought it?

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