Disaster – almost
We came close to disaster today. Thanks to me. Since we’ve moved the grow beds and added a new sump tank, we haven’t had a pump with the correct power on it to get the water from the sump tank back into the main fish tank for our fish to enjoy. So the fish tank empties really nicely, but the water doesn’t get back into it with quite such speed. This isn’t a problem if you only leave the pump running for 10 minutes. But today, (possibly due to my pregnancy brain or maybe even due to my abilities to get really distracted really easily) I left the pump on for an hour.
I only just realised what I done when I went down to collect my stone cold toast (which I’d also neglected for an hour) . I bolted up the back to find the fish tank, with our fish in it, was a quarter full. Much longer and all the fishies would have been gasping for breath. Also, the sump tank was overflowing as the underpowered pumps couldn’t get the water out fast enough. It was one of those terrible moments when you realise what an idiot you are and you thank your lucky stars you caught it before it got worse.
But the day wasn’t quite done with me – I grabbed the new garden hose to help refill the tank, which was lying innocently beside my foot. Now this beast has a tendancy to split into two sections – hose and nozzle. Too concnerned about the fish to show the hose any respect, I grabbed it by the nozzle, which promptly came off and a full stream of water soaked my clothes (AND BUNNY SLIPPERS) in seconds. So there I was, dripping wet, feeling pretty dumb and still nominally in charge of fixing the mess.
So I refilled the tank to half way. I decided to leave the water sit a while, instead of putting too much in, turning it from ‘hard water’ to ‘soft water’. I still have to fill up the rest of the tank this afternoon.
And as I’ve said before, the tank is in our backyard, near the shed, so in all of the commotion, I didn’t hear the postman knock on the door to deliver the new pump, which would have fixed all these problems. I found out he’d been from the little post ticket he left under the door – so I’ll be going to the post office this afternoon to get our new pump. My bunny slippers are drying now and I’m feeling very silly. But our fish are alive, the beds are still growing and the hose is obviously feeling pretty cocky right now I guess I can look on the bright side.
Moving the beds
This weekend we moved most of our aquaponics system into the light, about two meters right. Such a simple sentence. Deceptively simple. Somehow the scratches, the hefting of gravel and the sheer grunty hard work of it gets smoothed over. Let me tell you a little about it…
Our prototype system was set up in our backyard under an opaque roof adjoining the shed. It was a good place to start, and as we added fish, bacteria and vegetables, it served us well. Over the months however, we realized that we weren’t seeing the results from our beds that we had hoped. My father somewhat drying suggested we were growing a lovely set of miniature vegetables. So we checked what we knew – we checked the ratio of beds to water, we checked the quality of the water, we checked the amount of fish poo to plants. And still, we wondered why we weren’t getting the lush sort of crops that Joel Malcolm and the other members of the Aquaponics community casually talk about. We figured that most of these guys live in Queensland and its lush up there – throw a watermelon seed out your car window and the car behind you has to avoid the watermelons on the highway, its that lush. But apart from the natural fertility of the tropics of Queensland, we wondered why our system was going so slowly.
10 little fishies getting very fat
We currently have 10 healthy fat little fish! The water has been murky for about a month now and it’s just beginning to clear up. So we can see the fish flitting around and they’ve grown so much! They have gone from being about 40 mm long to over 100mm; visually it’s like they’ve grown from guppies to big strong fat silvery goldfish. And the speed on the blighters! I never saw any gold fish zip around like that, its really impressive!