Remember when you were a kid, waiting for Santa Claus to arrive and deliver presents? Well, we were feeling some of that sort of anticipation this week, waiting for our nitrifying bacteria to arrive in the post. Funnily, I think that at some point the anticipation about receiving presents is replaced with the anticipation of giving presents to the ones you love, so it was with some sort recognition of the child within that I looked each day at our post box for signs of a new parcel. Sure enough, we were soon rewarded with two little bottles, full of bacteria. I can honestly say I never thought I’d be keen to see bacteria in the post box! (It’s definitely better than a huntsman spider in the letter box though, which you usually get round this time of the year.)
That evening we opened up the bottles and applied the bottles to the grow beds. As we have a 500 Litre tank, we put in about 250ml of standard solution in. We don’t yet have any fish, so we could afford to wait for a few days for the solution to circle through the beds and the tank.
This bacteria will break down the ammonia produced by the fish as waste. A special type of bacteria called nitrosomos breaks down ammonia and turns it into nitrites in the grow beds. Another type of bacteria, called nitrobacter breaks down the nitrites and turns it into Nitrates, which the plants use as form of food.
After only a few days, our watercress, which acts as our system barometer telling us if the system is healthy or needs work, was looking lively and well, with many more new green shoots. We took this as a sign that the bacteria had started to produce food for our plants. We’re really looking forward to seeing a bit of a boom in plant growth, which so far has been a bit slow, as we haven’t really had any fish in the system.