Aquaponics - Slugs

As much as I wanted to eat my first strawberry, it turns out something else wanted to eat it more.

I like slugs as much as the next guy, but now I like slugs as much as the next guy if the next guy has just lost his first strawberries to slugs the day before he was going to eat them.









If the neighbourhood slugs are willing to share their half eaten strawberries with the me, its only natural that I should be willing to offer them a small spill of my beer. So I will.

A beer snail and slug trap consists of a small bowl of beer. That's all it takes to draw all the slugs from my nice organic produce into the depths of depravity, and drunken stupor.

















Unlike the thirty or fourty years it might take my fellow humans to die from over indulgence, slugs achieve this feat within hours. Or so I'm told.

I can wait all night.













Is there anything beer cant do?

Aquaponics - My first strawberry

One of the things most important to me in doing aquaponics, was to grow some strawberries. A lot of strawberries. I love them.

Some time ago I bought a selection of different varieties of strawberry to plant out to see which would work best in an aquaponics environment. Sadly only one seemed to thrive, and I have no idea which one it was.

Success! It's now fruiting, and in a couple of days I'll taste the fruits of my labour.

I'm now frantically searching to see if there is some way to clone this plant.

I know that at some stage in their growth cycle they send out runners, but there might be a way to divide up this plant to get a lot more going rather than doing all that waiting.











On a not so successful note, I planted out some seeds a few days ago, and there have been mixed results.

Pictured here are giant white radish.

For some crazy reason, many of them seem to have died.

They look like they over heated, but the weather was far too cool for that. They definitely didn't dry out. The only other thing I can think of was that perhaps the water and fish emulsion tea was too strong, and it burnt the leaves from direct contact.

I'll see if I can water them without getting them wet.