Aquaponics - Ripping up perfectly good things to make room for other things

I'm not sure if it's good growing practice to nurture plants until they start feeding you, then suddenly rip them out of the ground to make room for strawberries.

But I did it anyway.

I seem to remember doing this kind of thing before.

It seems my garden beds need to be a lot bigger.

My celery plants were actually doing quite well, and we had started harvesting stalks as we needed them.

These are from the original celery stubs that were left over from store bought bundles from the supermarket a year or two ago. 

I planted the empty, used up white base and they grew again and again. When they looked like there were trying to go to seed, I just cut it all back, and left it to grow again, but the second time around there was an established root system, so they grew much better.

But I've decided that I need the real estate for strawberries, so it all had to come up, as did the basil, and the silver beat (or perhaps it's spinach).

I have a lot of strawberry plants.

Someone was giving them away, and I couldn't resist. Thanks nice man who's name I don't even know.

Thanks universe.


I find myself with sixty strawberry plants, planted in dirt (and rubbish and rubble) along the side of my house, I think fifty or sixty will get crowded into a single blue barrel in the grow house, and another fifty or so might just live out their life in a shopping bag on my kitchen floor covered in weeds.

I'm still sick and it's raining, so I think I might just throw them behind the shed and come back in a year and see what happened.



120 Things in 20 years - Sees making room for new plants makes more sense than waiting a few weeks and harvesting the existing plants.

Aquaponics - My first spinach*

I harvested the first produce from my new grow bed today.

It's some absurdly healthy spinach*.

It looks like this. And if not for the fact that I used my kitchen door for scale, and you cant tell how big it is, you'd be able to see that it's big.

It's also really, really green. I've never seen spinach* look so good.

I harvested a hat full, but even then you cant tell how big it is, because that's a really big hat.

The biggest non-sombrero hat I've ever seen.

My spinach* is really big.

And really green.

Really really green.

I've also had hundreds of baby carrots.

There they are.

Hundreds of them.

They look like this up close.

Not so big.











Things seem to be growing well in the new constant flood grow beds.



*or silver beet


Wearing a hat filled with spinach* from your first harvest from a new grow beds is a good way to get a seat on a bus. In fact as my first ever 120 Things in 20 years public transport tip, I would say its a good way to empty a bus.

Aquaponics - disaster, strawberry towers, and narrowness

Normally I tend to dive right in to aquaponics disasters, but this time I thought I'd narrowly avoid one instead.

I decided to do a post on my two spinach plants I have growing in my strawberry towers.

That's them from the front...

and from the side.

I look at them every day, but what I don't see is the root system.

It turns out the root system has been growing down into the drain hole of the strawberry tower it lives in.

The result was the water was restricted from leaving the tower, and was getting ready to overflow at any minute.

Seen here is a meniscus forming on the lip of the hole for the plant. This is looking into the bottom  hole, down toward the drain.

Seconds to spare.

No doubt a lot of water was still getting through the drain, but it did look ripe for disaster.

The roots looked like this when I removed the plant. It's difficult to see in the picture, but they reach the ground. This means they were not just blocking the tube, but were probably growing in the large PVC drain half way to the fish tank.

Definitely something to look out for, and another mark in the "cons" column against my system design.

My only real course of action was to prune the roots. They were so long that even if I only used the top holes of the strawberry towers, they would still reach the bottom, and thus, the drain.




















120 things in 20 years, the disaster that never was - Aquaponics - disaster, strawberry towers, and narrowness