Aquaponics - New system at two months

In a couple of days my new system will be two months old.

I wasn't sure how it would go being on the wrong side of the house and in shade for all but a couple of hours a day, but it looks like it might be ok.

This is the original empty growbed two months ago.

And now it looks like this.

The lettuce in the foreground went in as store bought seedlings, and the rest was from seed, but I wasted a lot of time before I actually sowed them.

We have started harvesting leaves from the lettuce and within a week or two we should be picking rocket as well.





The growbed is around two metres long and a little over a metre wide, so it should keep us in salad greens with ease.

I've also planted a few sugar snap peas at the back because I like to eat them when I'm doing anything with the garden. There's not enough to harvest but I enjoy picking something and eating it at the growbed.

Also at the back I've planted quite a bit of basil, some coriander (cilantro), and a few other herbs.

That's all. Just a quick update.

Aquaponics - PVC Tube tomato

My PVC tube tomato seems to have found it's feet.

It took a while after I removed all but four or so leaves on each of the four plants that make up this particular experiment.

 It's probably back to around what it looked like four weeks ago.

By my standards, that actually constitutes success.





On a side note, the foliage in the background is the grow bed that I emptied and flooded around five weeks ago (flooded to get any slugs out).

That's lettuce you can see, and we've been cutting a salad a day from just that right hand side. The left hand side was Bok Choy, but that all went to seed, and has since been fed to my worms.

When I put the seedlings in (bought from a shop) I also sprinkled some mixed lettuce seeds around.

It looks like this five weeks later.

We've been harvesting from the front, and you can see some of the seedlings from the seeds are looking a little weak because they have been struggling for light, but now they have some, they will spring to life.

In summer, and harvesting a light lunch size salad each day, (in Adelaide South Australia at least) we found you need around half a blue barrel worth of growbed real estate, as long as you seed every week.

I like coz lettuce because it can be harvested as it grows (ie just cutting off leaves rather than pulling up the plant) , but these loose leaf varieties are proving to be quick growing, and can also be repeat harvested. if you drop seeds in around the seedlings when the seedlings are around the size you buy them at, the seeds are seedlings when the lettuce has been repeat harvested as much as it can, and finally gets pulled out.  I just read that again, and I think all that means something. 

The leaves get bitter toward the end of the lettuce life cycle as they are about to go to seed. The leaves  also grow further apart. So once they start growing from a stalk rather than from a central point at the base, it's time to pull the plant up, and let the light in to the little ones, that are by this time the size of the store bought seedlings.

I don't think I've ever grown the iceberg style lettuce that grows like a cabbage, so I don't know if you can repeat harvest that, but I suspect not. 

I used to take a lot of care with growing lettuce seedlings, and transplanting them, but now all I do is put a stack of different seeds into a jar, and sprinkle a pinch of them around directly into the growbed. 

I suspect the clay balls are better than scoria when you direct seed. I think the seed (especially small seeds like lettuce) fall down until they stick to the side of the media once it's deep enough that the media is damp. 

I suspect that's just right as far ar growing goes. 

Perhaps with scoria, the seeds catch in the holes in the media before they get to the correct depth. 

Or it could just be luck, but I'm seeing much better germination rates in the clay ball media. 

But it's also a constant flood grow bed, so perhaps that's got something to do with it as well. 

120 Things in 20 years - Results, but no science to back it. Oh, and also PVC Aquaponics tomatoes.

Aquaponics - modular potting III

I thought I might take this modular garden design just one step further.

If I cut holes in 90mm PVC piping so that at one end they are close together, and then progressively get further apart, it should allow me to grow twice as much stuff in one length of PVC, because the gaps between the holes, only need to be the size of the different sized lettuce as they grow up.

If I plant say 2 lettuce seeds in a pot every few days, I should be able to move the tubes along as they need more space, and as I need to plant another pair of lettuce for continuous supply.

So to start with I plant a lettuce in the space on the left. I wait a few days, move the first pot to the right, put a new empty pot in the first slot, and plant some seeds in it.

If I keep doing this every few days, or once a week, I get a continuous supply of lettuce. Or whatever else.

Anything that grows for a long time, like say chilli plants, I'll put into the main grow bed, but all the smaller fast growing things, I should be able to at least double the number of plants I can keep. And all without having to transplant.

I'm guessing it might take 20 seconds to move 10 lettuce along each week.

I think I've become obsessed with seeing how productive I can make my 5 cubic metres of grow house.

Snail farming - Farm idea

It occurred to me a while ago that the basic aquaponics system could be adapted to growing snails. This came about partly because my lease says I'm not to have fish, but mentions nothing about snails, and partly because I couldn't help it.

Sometimes stuff just occurs to me.

My current aquaponics system looks like this. Water (and fish) at the bottom, veggies growing in an inert media in the container above.

I could just add snails to the top garden section, but they would eat everything to death within seconds.







My plan would be to restrict how much of the fresh growing vegetable matter they could get at, in the hope that the plants could be kept alive for ever.

It would look something like this.

"A" and "B" would be the normal water levels of the flood and drain cycle, And "C" would be a once or twice a day rinse to bring down solids from the snail area. Those brown things are my depiction of snails. Those green things are lettuce growing.

The snails would be in a stainless steel wire cage, which would allow them access to only the tops of plants (lettuce etc) growing in the aquaponics system.

The cage would be covered on all sides so the snails couldn't escape, and would have some terracotta pots to hide under, water, calcium supplements, and whatever else it turns out snails like.

The rinse cycle should in theory, pull solids down into the garden level, where added compost worms would digest them and spread them out,  so the nitrifying bacteria in the media could do its thing. This would in turn feed the plants that would partly feed the snails.

The system wouldn't work as an endless loop because I'll be pulling snails out for escargot. Once you eat something from the system, the removed energy needs to be replaced. That's where the veggie scraps come in. Since moving from the country where we had all kinds of scraps eating critters that did things like convert scraps to eggs, I've become a bit freaked at how much food we throw away.

Gram for gram the scraps represent almost as much as we eat. Much of it will make snail food.

So that's the plan, but plans have a habit of changing around here.

Inputs would be household kitchen scraps, and perhaps a little calcium for their shells.