Sure I can share.
I have been doing this for a little over a decade. It started when I got an Earthbox for my mother. Normal tomatoes in pots in front of the house need to be watered twice a day on high heat days. The Earthbox by having a reservoir and wicking will mostly do at least 2 days in the same place. That got me to think what if that reservoir could be bigger? I had a 4ft square piece of the 2 inch construction foam of the type that isn't supposed to absorb water and some scraps of same to build edges with. To attach the edges I used foam save construction glue and pinned it with nails. I then punched 4 evenly spaced about 3 1/2 inch diameter holes in it. Covered it in landscape fabric and pushed pockets into the fabric down into the water and then covered it all in potting soil. Got decent tomatoes the first year but learned a few things along the way. First is that as the plants set fruit the float sinks which changes how the water wicks and the plants were struggling with being to wet especially late season. Pulled the float in in the fall and took it in. But cows got into where it was stored and the foam got broken.
But it had worked so easily I decide to invest in a new foam. Did 2 things to counter the plants getting to wet the next year. I reduced the number of wicking holes to 2 from the original 4 when I made the new foam and I added rocks that I could remove to reduce the weight. Things got better. Still a bit of yellowing from over water late season. But this was the year that really proved the worth of the system. Had water delivery problems and the garden plants produced very little while the plants floating on the pond did wonderfully. And I had far less labor in them. I had started with potting soil so no weeding and in one of the driest climates on earth I had never watered them past when I put the plants out.
Now we are to year 3. The float when I pulled it the previous fall had waterlogged a bit but by spring was dry again so it was reused. Next lesson learned is that foam water logs faster the next year. Had a bit of trouble with yellow plants in spite of being able to remove weight from the float. By the end the 2nd year the soil was nearly floating right at level with the water rather than above it.
Next thought was what about stacking the float damaged by being water logged with another foam. So that is whay I did year 4. This put the float a bit higher and I was concerned would it wick that high. So I piled more soil on to sink it a bit. Deeper soil means needing higher side walls. So I changed from rocks as removable weight to 2 liter pop bottles. Advantage in the spring of having water as mass to protect plants from freezing under the plastic cover and late season the roots should hold the soil together enough when bottles removed or partially emptied. Plants did better with deeper soil. Another year down and okay for the year.
Next years problems with foam sinking to much in spite of being double stacked. That lead to my most expensive mistake doing this. That fall I decide that maybe I needed to protect the foam from the water. Get a new foam to start with. The plan to fiberglass it like a surf board. One of the brands of auto body fiber glass resin is safe for food. So since I was doing large areas I mixed a big batch spread the first, layed the fiber and poured the rest of the resin over it. Everything is looking good. Come back about 10 minutes later and most of the foam has melted and the resin and melted foam are sticking to the floor. Opps. So much for that plan. Some research and I learn that there are special resins that are foam safe but that they are more expensive and by the time I get a hazadous materials shipping charge on them I think to high priced for this
project.
Okay so what do I try now? Next idea was to tie floats under the foam to help hold it up. I have plenty of 2 liter bottles around so lets start there. Use bailing twine like belts around the foam to hold the bottles under the foam. Problem is that by the end of the season the twine is cutting the foam and wind and wave have torn some of the bottles out from under the float. Got a decent crop but the foam is basically dead yet again. I can't keep wasting foam like this but love the system for tomatoes. Some other vegetables have done okay but the tomatoes are loving it. While in a properly tended garden production per plant is higher in out climate things are so water sensitive it is very easy to screw up while this system on the other hand is basically plant and ignore till time to pick. To pick lay on the pier and float the garden by while you pick. Want to look from another angle turn the garden around and float it by again. The main garden has coon an skunk problems. But this garden only has ever had a coon problem once when it floated and sort of wedged under the pier so the coons jumped down from the pier in. Never have had a skunk problem. Having a permanent moat helps greatly with this. And when grasshoppers decimate the normal garden the floating one has come through with far less damage. Partly moat and partly you scare the grasshoppers off it and they end up in the water and many don't make it back. Over all it has been very worth while. Now there are a few problems that a normal garden doesn't have to though. We don't have a slug problem here because our climate is to dry. But tomatoes that hang off into the water will be destroyed by pond snails. They ignore plants in the water but the fruit simply is destroyed. And I had one year that about half of my first planting of plants was destroyed by muskrats playing on the float. They had been sunning themselves on it and had been harmless but they had a fight or something and leveled about half the plants on the float on night.
Now I will stop and share a bit of history learned along the way. The Mayans used floating gardens, floating stuff was likely used in the gardens of Babylon, the chinese have used floating gardens and there is a tribe on a lake in Africa that floats everything including the gardens on the lake to list a few. At any rate it turns out that floating gardens date back thousands of years and have been used by many cultures. That brings us to the modern world. The first article I found on someone else doing this was in Farm Show magazine/newspaper. It was a guy from TX who was building a raft of 10 or 12 inch pvc pipes capped on both ends and tied together just like a log raft. His floating garden you actually walked on. He was using leaves from the trees in the fall to cover the raft as his soil. Since he had way more raft his "soil" could be deeper and he was growing nearly everything. I have also encountered since several articles on doing it on actual log rafts.
This brings us to my need to redesign my raft. The pvc log raft sounded like a great idea till I priced what end caps cost. So what could I do that I could afford? Log rafts were out because I didn't have the logs and was concerned about them water logging over time and sinking. The 2 liter pop bottles are incredibly durable and looked like they would have worked if I had a solid frame work to tie them to instead of trying to anchor them to the foam. The foam can't water log if it is never in the water and I have it from the previous failures. I also wanted permanent structure to be able to cover the plants fall and spring.
This lead to my current design. The framework is 4" schedule PVC to give me rigidity. Allowing for the corners it is 4 feet wide so the foam rests down the curve a bit so it is supported both horizontally and vertically by the pipe. My length was determined by what was left over from the 10 ft joints of pipe allowing for that fit down the curve and for the space taken by the corners. Primary buoyancy is provided by 70 2 liter pop bottles laying on their sides. 7 rows of 10 each. In 3 sets of rows the necks are interlace like fingers. All the necks are tied together with bale twine. 3 sets of 20(10 face each way) and 1 set of 10. I then tie the twine to the pipes on the side of the frame work. Between the frame work corralling the bottles and the fact that they are tied they have stayed perfectly Over the top of this goes the foam sheeting and edges just like before except now the foam doesn't touch the water. This gives a foam size a little over 6 feet long by 4 feet wide. Over this the landscape fabric, The edges of the foam and landscape fabric are covered with a bunch of the woven poly cat food sacks turned inside out. This protects both the landscape fabric and the foam from the sun. Inside the edges the entire perimeter is lined with 2 liter bottles full of water laying on their sides. This about doubles the height of the soil you can hold on, gives thermal mass for spring and fall and helps hold the foam in place. Once that is all in place 2 furring strips with nails down through them were laid long ways on sides to protect the foam rails from the twine. The nails anchor the boards side to side to the foam and also pin the landscape fabric and catfood sacks in place. Twine is then run from side to side over the top and between bottle ends to tie the foam to the framework. It is now trapped by the bottles and twine on the bottom and by the crisscrossing twine over the rails on the top. Doing a crisscross X above everything running diagonally from corner to corner on the framework is a set of arches of 1" pvc to support row cover plastic for spring and fall. The potting soil is then added. The wicking pockets of soil down to the water just push a float bottle aside each and there are 2 of them. Same about 3 1/2" hole I used in the first float.
The first year of the redesign I was running the recycled foam so it was in 2 pieces. Found the lack of rigidity at the joint caused the foam to sag. Needs to be a full sheet. So replaced the foam for the second year. This design works out nicely for a 4x8 sheet. Cut it to length and then cut the remainder in roughly 2" wide strips to form the perimeter. Basically no waste. Worked beautifully the second year. Because of various things I didn't get it pulled that year so it spent the winter in the reservoir. No apparent damage from that. This lead to my only crop failure with this system though. Since I hadn't unloaded the past year's potting soil I let lazy tempt me into reusing it. About 6 weeks after transplant the tomato plants started showing nutrient deficiencies(Mg and Ca) and they were not growing as good either so I slugged them with fertilizer. Got a bit to much on and killed about half the plants and badly stunted the rest. Left the float out for the winter the next year too. Everything was still fine in mid march. The next time I looked at the float was in April and something had completely wrecked the foam. As best I can tell about the time the ice was going out something(guessing
deer) had tried to step on the float and fallen through one corner. In the struggle the foam was broken else where besides. So now I have to replace the foam again. The next year I tried piling the potting soil way deeper in the middle rather than roughly leveling it. Looked good to begin with but then the foam bent and saggedunder the uneven load. By fall the foam was actually down in the water in the middle. If I try that again I will have to add some rigid joists from side to side over the necks of the bottles.
First picture is from back when I was using the foam on the water system. The float in the background was a bunch of lettuce and other stuff that didn't do real good because it simply stayed a bit to wet.
The next picture is from the redesigned system
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Now for lessons learned along the way.
The "soil" needs to be nearly pure larger organic matter. It gets to soggy otherwise. Manure and dirt mixed was the worst. Best tried is miracle grow potting soil over several inches of leaves and grass clippings and a does of fertilizer mid season to bump the nitrogen..
The cover over the plants seals nicely because it is down in the water on all sides. It also helps protect the edges from wind so those are good things. The bad is that it gets super hot inside because it doesn't leak and you can easily scald plants spring and fall. Keep thinking need to design some sort of thermal siphon vent into the system.
The crisscross pipes are not heavy enough for high winds by themselves. Think it needs to be arches across the narrow direction. This would also let them be taller as you will notice the plants had to be packed down to go under the cover in the fall.
I have had trouble the last 2 years with some long legged really long billed brown bird about the size of a black bird. They punch holes in all the tomatoes. The first year I was blaming rodents or thinking maybe I had a coon or something getting on the raft so I covered the raft in traps. Leg hold down to
mouse traps. I could trap hard because none of my animals were going to get on a floating island. Caught 2 birds in traps and the problem went away. Never did catch it this last year but the problem was identical. Will likely need to add bird netting into the future.
Now about the bottles. Because I wanted them mildly pressured up so they didn't collapse I filled them mid winter after they had been outside. The first year just a couple of bottles had leaked off enough to not be under pressure. By the 3rd year when I was replacing the float about half were no longer under pressure but only one was collapsing.
For the future, the bottles for the next float I sealed the caps with silicon too hoping to improve the seal. I have been collecting salad dressing jars and washing them and I will seal them too. They just exactly fit down the pvc pipe. My thinking here is that even if the frame springs a leak the jars will keep it floating.
Now I am only guessing but I think this can be used to conserve water. The farm magazines all tell you that a closed row cover crop uses less water than bare soil. Wouldn't the same thing apply over water? So my thinking is I can conserve water and grow a crop at the same time. And I know it keeps the water cooler under the float so enough floats should help the water cool enough for fish. Plus spooking the grasshoppers off the float is providing fish food as well as reducing insect damage. If I can get 2 identical stock tanks I can easily check this much. If that proves out then can the float structures be 3D printed with recycled plastics to grow a crop and
save water at the same time? Use 2 liter bottles as load cells simply because they are easy to replace and build a plastic frame work they snap into. Start the crops on a float in the
greenhouse and then move the whole float out in the spring so they don't have to be transplanted.
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I had a pyrenees about 15 years ago.....boy did he wander. LOL Pretty neat dog. My grandpa got a maramot....."just googled this, I can't find anything called a maramot sheep dog." Anyhow that's what my grandpa always called her. But maybe she's a maremma..?? Dunno? But anyhow, she's a great dog. My uncles 40 cows (20 pair) got loose about three weeks ago, and she kept them all off the lawn and out of my forest garden. It was awesome, she stood guard all night and kept them in one of the fields. Every time the cows got close to the opening that's right next to the house/yard, she would jump up, charge at them with her tail flagging this way and that, while growl/barking at them until they ran back into the field. I'm surprised the cows didn't scatter to the mountains though.....there was another opening away from the house next to a road that goes right up the mountain.
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