Aquaponics - Vivipary strawberry propagation fail

It looks like my absurd strawberry has pretty much failed to do much of anything except go all floopy, and look a lot more like earth than it did a few days ago..

I was (of course) hoping it would change the world in some enormous way, but alas it was not to be.

On the up side, a few of my very healthy normal strawberry plants are actually doing quite well, and have started to send out yet more runners, so "normal" might turn out to be a pretty good approach after all.

I think This might be my first post without a photo, so given the strawberry has turned to what looks like earth, I'll post this pic in place of anything meaningful.



120 Things In 20 Years thinks  the world might have slipped back into normal mode when it comes to strawberry propagation.

Aquaponics - Strawberry propagation

I found a new way to propagate strawberries. Or at least it's new to me. The secret is to have the seeds sprout while it's still on the fruit.

Although I would have liked to leave it alone to see if they would all grow by themselves, the fruit is almost rotten so I thought it would be better to pick it and plant them all.

It came from a dirt garden so there was a lot of risk of it being eaten by things before they had a chance to grow.

I planted it into my aquaponics system.





From what I could see, all the seeds had sprouted.

I have no idea what conditions were required to make it happen or if they will actually end up growing, but the original plant was a modern lab created thing that didn't produce runners. Or almost didn't. From around 60 plants I think I've seen two runners in two years.

120ThingsIn20Years thinks the world is odd.

Aquaponics - New strawberry plants

They don't look like much after spending the week in a shopping bag on my kitchen floor, but fifty or so of the new strawberry plants have been crowded into a single grow bed.

Lucky for them (and us) they are at least in the strawberry equivalent of incentive care. If there is one place they might get over their rough treatment, it's an aquaponics system.

They look a bit like this at the moment, and I've just noticed that a few of them are sporting fruit.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, and I'm also not sure when they are meant to fruit.

One of the problems with found stuff, is that you never know it's history.

Any way, aside form their leaves not really knowing which way is up, they look like they might be ok.

They are way too crowded where they are (I think) so I'm going to have to create something a bit better.

But that's going to have to wait until I don't feel quite as ill as I do at the moment.






120 Things in 20 years see's me needing the vitamin C from my new strawberry plant's fruit, before I can gather the energy to start building a decent home for them to grow in.

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 - 51 strawberries on a single plant

Is it normal to see 51 strawberries on a single plant?

I have no idea, but it seems like a lot to me.

Most of them are still in the tiny bud stage, but it still seems like a lot.

That's one of the best aspects of this aquaponics adventure. I keep learning new stuff even without study. I just wander out to eat something, and accidental learn something new.

Sometimes I learn that I don't have a clue what I'm doing, but that's good too.

Aquaponics - strawberry pollination thoughts

Some of my strawberries are a little odd in the way they are forming. Some didn't form at all.

I put the not forming at all problem down to poor pollination. It always seemed to be the ones hidden under leaves or pressed against the corner of the scoria and the side of the barrel.

I have a feeling the poorly formed ones might also be a pollination issue.

As I mentioned in a previous post, strawberries are not really the fruit, they are a fruit holder, the fruit are the little dots on the surface, and they each hold a seed.

In this pic we can see a crease where the strawberry isn't big and red, and we can see the dots that are actually the fruit, are tiny and not formed. I have a feeling these are fruit that didn't get pollinated. When none of them get pollinated, it might explain why I get no "fruit" at all.

All my latest strawberries look like this, and are fast becoming the highlight of the grow house.

I don't actually know if this is a pollination issue, it's just a thought.










Unfortunately when I was between grow houses, there were some strawberry plants that lived in a NFT tube for four days with no nutrient rich water flowing around their roots.

This has left the roots dried and not looking too healthy. The plants are wilting, and the existing fruit on those plants is drying up and looking a bit sad. They are trying desperately to make a comeback, and my aquaponics system has seen some amazing comebacks, so there is still hope, but I think I may have lost out on the bumper harvest I might have had.

I'm adding some water by hand to These plants because I'm concerned that the roots that are touching the water might actually be dead.

Only time will tell.

Home-grown strawberries are delicious.

Aquaponics - Strawberry seeds

Strawberry plants from seeds!

I had no idea.

A few people I've spoken to about them, said that they haven't had much luck with germinating strawberry seeds, but there are some that have.

I plan on being in the "some that have group".

Strawberry seeds are roughly as small as you might imagine they would be. This isn't actually a strawberry seed pictured to the left with the toothpick, its a bit of dirt.

But it looks a lot like a strawberry seed.

By the time I realised I needed a photo of a strawberry seed, I didn't have any left, so I just substituted some seed shaped dirt.

Nobody will ever know.

I started out with some seed raising mix because of the reports I've read of other people struggling to get their seeds to germinate. I'm not sure that this is actually necessary, but it will mean I can rule out out poor soil if they fail.

I placed a seed in each pot, covered lightly with seed raising mix then pressed to contact.

Then I lightly watered them.













I'm not sure about the economics of using seeds as there were only eleven seeds in one of the packets.

I did actually email the company because I was a little disappointed, and they replied asking for my phone number, so perhaps that's not normal. I wont mention the brand just yet and see what happens. It could just be that the receptionist is going to ask me out on a date.

I'll wait and see.

The seeds cost around $7 a packet, and on the same day I bought nine little strawberry seedlings for $3.95, so unless my strawberries grow very rapidly up to the clouds revealing giants, special geese, and general adventure, I suspect I wont be buying any more.

From what I've been told by seed packets and humans, I should be waiting for some time between a day or two and eternity for these things to germinate.

So I guess there's nothing left to do but to watch this space.

I hate waiting.


.

Aquaponics - Strawberries!

Strawberries!

I love strawberries.


And always get a little excited when I see the flowers.


I've been buying just one of each variety when I see them for sale to see what does well in aquaponics.  The very first plant I put in didn't do so well and died back, almost as far as it could before being called dead, but it's runners have all established and now all have flowers and fruit.


Strawberry plants get old and stop producing after a few years, so perhaps I bought an old plant. It was from a market stall so who knows what it was.


I've also bought a variety with, it turns out, a pink flower. I didn't know strawberries did that. This variety seems to be called Fragaria.

The other things I didn't know include the fact that strawberries are not really fruit. 


From what I can gather, the fruit is a fruit holder, and the fruit are these little pink protrusions that I think are flowers, or some other form of reproductive bit, and end up as a seed containing ovaries of the flower.


In a house I lived in as a kid, there was an uncared for strawberry patch that we discovered was full of hidden little strawberries that we would spend lots of fun time searching through.


These fond memories, and the fact that there were never enough of them are, I think, the driving force behind wanting to grow a lot of strawberries. Fresh home picked strawberries also make a very nice thing to be able to take to someone's house if you are dropping in for for dinner.


Grow some strawberries. Heaps of them. Kids love them and so do grown-ups. They don't take a lot of care, and if you grow them in aquaponics, they take even less. Just pull out any plants that stop fruiting when they get old. Or better yet, pull out last years and put them out to pasture in a wild patch in the corner of your back yard. 


They like plenty of water when starting out and when fruiting, don't like salt much, and the biggest threat to them is slugs and children. I believe they also like a pH closer to pH 6, but seem to cope with between pH 5.5 and pH 7.5, but found this difficult to nail down. It might just be different varieties prefer different conditions. 

Aquaponics - Poop

Common practice is to spread your solids fish waste evenly over the grow beds so as to avoid creating dead areas depleted of oxygen, and perhaps containing too much nutrient for the plants. People often add composting worms to their grow beds to aid in the break down of fish solids. The normal method of distribution, is to split your incoming water into several outlets. This is often done by making a loop of hose that surrounds your grow bed, and drilling holes so water enters from all around.

I'm trying something a bit different. [note from the future - I'm currently engaged in a debate as to this being a good idea or not, so copy this approach at your own risk (even slightly more than everything else of here should be copied at your own risk)]

A few weeks ago I tried adding the water directly to the siphon area. Rather than going through the grow bed media, it just feeds into the gap between the media screen and the siphon. What this means is that the clear water spreads throughout the media, but the solids get dumped back into the fish tank.

Normally, the point is to try to get the solids out of the fishtank, but this way the solids get broken up each time they get dumped back into the fish tank. they just seem to vanish after going through the system a few times. At any time, when you look into the water, there is about the same amount of solid fish waste in the water. It's normally queued up in a bit of a whirlpool that forms near the pump. At any one time there might be a teaspoon of solids and bits of who knows what in the little pile.

It's possible that this will all end in disaster, but it's also possible that this is a viable method of mechanically breaking down fish solids before they do into the grow bed.

Because I'm lazy, it's also worked out nicely that I didn't even have to make anything. All I had to do was extend the pump hose so it would reach the siphon.

There is some chance that the solids are building up on the far side of the media screen (in my case, the soft drink bottle that keeps the grow media away from the siphon) but the water rushes to the siphon quite quickly once it triggers, so I suspect it would draw any solids back through the screen and into the fish tank.

I'm keeping a close eye on it and will let you know if any further developments manifest.

By the way, that's strawberries at the top left, three week old coz lettuce (from seedlings) top right and bottom, and the little ones in the middle are baby spinach (also planted three weeks ago from tiny seedlings). Interestingly I planted the spinach on a hot day in the middle of the day and they all wilted to the point where I was sure none would live. Two days later they were still alive but were all wilted to the point of laying flat on the ground. But now every single one is thriving.

We should be harvesting individual salad leaves within a week.

Aquaponics is like intensive care for plants.

Aquaponics - Slugs 2

In keeping with my policy of being wrong from time to time, it doesn't seem to be slugs eating my strawberries.

The night before last it was raining, and the slugs were out in force on the paths around the small aquaponics test system, so if ever there was a night for my trap to work, it should have been this one.

My beer trap managed to trap exactly no slugs whatsoever.

It did however manage to catch a number of very small flies. I doubt they could have been the culprits, but the fact that they like beer may indicate they like fruit. Often bugs seem to be attracted to the ethanol produced in decaying fruit.

My strawberries where in good  health, and not at all over ripe, so who knows.

I might try flooding my garden bed to see what crawls out.