Auqaponics - Baby spinach

Normal people buy seedlings from plant stores.

Normal people type on normal keyboards.

i'm typng this on tisflexible waterproofkeyborthat my mumbughtfor me for my boatt trip becausei spilt scotch ndcoke nto my old keyboard.

t's ok .

tat'th best cnsay for it.

From this oinon I'll do some proof reaing,nd tryto edit it so it's actually readable.

I bought some baby spinach from my local supermarket today, and thought I'd plant it out rather than just eat it.

It looked a little sad so it only cost a few cents.

But There was a decent root mass so I thought it might be viable.

I trimmed all the sick looking leaves and think I now have some baby spinach plants.

I'll post  an update in a few days after cutting off all the leaves that will inevitably die, but I  think the plants will survive.







10htings in20 years reallyneeds tobuya new keyboard

Aquaponics - My million new friends

It seems I'm about to have a million new visitors to my garden. I hope they like me.

All the baby spinach are covered in what looks a lot like eggs.

There is some, slim chance they are something good, but I'm told by various people that they might be snail eggs, or slugs eggs. If they are slug eggs, I'm going to have to do something drastic.

I think our snails lay eggs underground, and I met a slug couple under a rock that I moved. So I'm thinking slugs, but the eggs are tiny. Perhaps 0.2 millimetre. That's a baby spinach leaf, so these things a really small.

I don't like slugs so much.

Kind of, too... sluggy.

I don't even like the name.

Slug. Needs more g's

Anyway...

I found this interesting looking guy that I think might be a black soldier fly. If it is I'm very happy.

Black soldier fly or BSF, are a fly that has little in common with the house fly. For one thing they don't eat. They are really just the mating and egg laying retirement, of the BSF larva that eat compost.  They don't bother people and, as far as I know, don't do any harm. They are just obsessed with compost. I know some people like that, and they tend toward the harmless end of the social spectrum as well.

BSF larva make great food for fish. If I do have some, I might try to breed some. Perhaps I already have. They might be the ones laying the eggs.


Whatever they are, there's going to be a lot of them.

I hope they're friendly.

[edit from the future - They're not friendly. My hatched bugs look like aphids]

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.

Cheese - Fired haloumi

An unqualified success! I did make cheese. In fact I made a cow's milk version of haloumi.

Fresh (cow's milk) haloumi looks like this...

After running it through a menu that went something like this...

Pan fried bovine haloumi in garlic and fennel seed infused Italian olive oil with pistachio nuts, shallot, mushroom and tomato, on a bed of baby spinach with fresh cracked black pepper and a drizzle of lemon juice.

and it looked something like this...

And it was good. I would have been quite happy had I been served it in a restaurant. The only thing that could have made it better was to share it.

And I did...

I throughly recommend you give homemade haloumi a go. For the most part, the temperatures are all child friendly, so get some kids involved. It was much easier than I expected and I can't see much that could go wrong.

Total cost to make the cheese in Australian dollars was $4.39 in un-homogenized milk and a few cents worth of rennet.

Total time was around 3 hours. But with only a few minutes actual work. It's also worth noting that a larger batch would take no longer to prepare. I can see no problem with freezing this cheese.

I will definitely be making this cheese again and again.

Lastly I think I read somewhere that traditionally its stored in mint leaves. True or not, I put some mint into the container of cheese and it successfully imparts a subtle mint flavour that compliments the cheese nicely. I've also had it cooked with fennel leaves to excellent effect.