Banana Circle Gray Water Disposal

Good afternoon Permies,

Just thought I would share my latest project, which utilises my grey water to keep a stand of Banana trees watered. I saw the idea online in several different infographics. It appears to have originated in Brazil as a way to process Gray water with a return for houses not connected to mains plumbing.

I took screen shots of my preferred infographic and put it through google translate to get an English translation of the Portuguese. It reads like a research paper, and points out that Banana trees don't take up the excess nutrients into their cell walls like most other plants would. The smell of the Gray water is also mitigated by running it underground into a mulch pile.

It seems to be working quite well! Where I live is really dry at the moment so it's quite gratifying to see a bit of green.

As a final step I'll be layering everything in chip bark and planting large leaf ground covers like sweet potato and nasturtiums to help reduce evaporation.

Thanks for reading

Hello again Permies,

Thought I would post an update on my banana circle, it's been about a year since I planted my little trees and they're kicking along really well.

In particular the tree down hill has done the best (getting the most hydration, thanks gravity) but all are doing very well. Currently got a sweet potato as a ground cover (extremely vigorous, I mow it back when it creeps out and throw the clippings back on top of the central mulch pile) got clover trying to grow around the outside. Looking to put some decorative ginger in soonish, and am trialling lemongrass downhill.

Not planning to eat anything but the bananas at this stage, don't have much info regarding how the other plants uptake nutrients from the grey water so playing it safe.

It's provided a lot of habitat. I've seen frogs, collected snake skin after cutting back some sweet potato vine, the sweet potato leaves are plagued by grasshoppers after some recent rain but just keep coming back for more. The birds like to land in the bananas and I imagine I'm going to have to be quick to net them when they fruit. Really pleased with how it's essentially become it's own little ecosystem.

If anyone has been considering using this method I'd recommend it purely for the fecundity that springs forth!

Looks great! Thanks for posting an update. There are so many projects I find here on Permies that I wonder how they turned out.

Aaron Yarbrough wrote:Looks great! Thanks for posting an update. There are so many projects I find here on Permies that I wonder how they turned out.

Thanks! It's been so cool to watch it develop, i was holding off on posting earlier haha. I was going to start a YouTube channel or a blog to keep track of my projects but I'm glad I stumbled across permies.com :)