Pests
Over the past few weeks, as our aquaponics system has been working and plants have been growing, a few annoying pests have made their appearance.
When we started this project, a few months back, we had no idea what we were embarking ourselves into . I thought that it would be straight forward (“how hard can it be to grow plants?”), just farm some fish and as a by-product get some organic vegetables, right? I loved the technical aspect of it all, i.e. connecting pumps, floats, etc. A system like this was something completely new to me, I had never done any plumbing or had any fish.
As time passes by, my respect for organic farms and aquaculturists (is that a word?) grows. It’s not an easy endeavour. Fighting pests without poisoning your fish (and yourself as the one that will eat the fish) is not simple.
The system requires some attention as well. When Ezequiel was born, on Dec 10th, we were away for 5 days during which I just came home a few times from the hospital to feed the fish but I didn’t do anything else, i.e. I didn’t remove anything that fell off with the wind, etc. At that time I thought to myself that the system wouldn’t take much work (this was 2 weeks ago). However since we have been back home, we had paid some close attention to the system and saw how dozens of caterpillars started to eat our chard, tomatos, even our marigolds. We take them away, feed them to the fish and every day there’s at least 4 more that appear out of nowhere.
I’ve read interesting posts on the Backyard Aquaponics Forums on using Dipel to fight off those damned caterpillars. My concern at the moment is that there doesn’t seem to be a consensus that it’s not going to hurt our fish. However I don’t seem to have a choice at the moment. So I will try that as soon as we can get it.
Yellow Ladybug
Yellow Ladybug, originally uploaded by brunom.
Another visitor to our aquaponics system.
Spider eating caterpillar
Spider eating caterpillar, originally uploaded by dhickie.
We like spiders that eat the ‘bad bugs’. Check this one out – he has a dessicated caterpillar carcass in his mandibles, and also he’s a lovely shade of bright green.
Rainbow chard works well in Aquaponics
Chard and Marigold, originally uploaded by brunom.
I have to say that one of the most robust plants we have growing in the beds at the moment are the rainbow chard plants. With beautiful yellow, white or deep red stems they are visually quite stunning, as well as delicious when stir fried.
In comparison to the lettuce we planted, the chard seems to be not as attractive to the numerous caterpillars we often get. OK, sure, we get caterpillars eating our chard too, but it seems they’d far prefer a nice marigold or a soft lettuce leaf than the spinachy goodness of chard!
Aquaponics Uncategorized: beds evolution progress The history of our aquaponics system in photos
by danielle
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December 2007
Overview of System, originally uploaded by brunom.
This is our bed in December 2007. We’ve got a prominent pumpkin growing up there in the front, plus some established tomatoes you can see in the back ground, and a few marigolds. In the big fiberglass bed on the right you can see some little seedlings we’ve just planted, including parsley, cherry tomatoes in yellow, orange and red, eggplant, lettuce, small leeks and basil.
Overview of System
The aquaponics system in our backyard is growing some great crops and they are increasing in size at a phenomenal rate. Since we’ve added the larger growbed and moved everything under a sunnier spot, it seems to have made a huge difference.
You can see the whole thing on the picture. The large, white, growbed, has two different type of lettuces, mignonette and danyelle. The second set is from greenharvest.com.au and is an organic seed. I am looking forward to be able to harvest those and eat them (hopefully we’ll be able to do that before the bloody caterpillars eat everything) 
Towards the sides of the growbed, we have eggplants, zucchini, tomato (all the plants on the side of the bed). Finally, at the end we have some parsley, coriander and a chilli plant.
It’s worth remembering that this system is a prototype, i.e. when we started it we had no idea what we were doing and we thought “we are intelligent people, we can figure it out” and only after a lot of research, help from really friendly folks at the backyard aquaponics forums and trial and error, is that we are were we are.
The main challenge that we are facing at the moment are the pests, both animal as well as funghi … it’s getting warmers and humid and all sorts of creatures seem to thrive as much as our plants (well, mainly because we are preparing a substantial banquet for all of them). So far, the only way we’ve been dealing with all the pests has been by spraying dilluted seasol … it’s a very tricky thing to do in an aquaponics system, you can’t just use garlic spray like you find at Bunnings or things like that as they contain soap and other components that you don’t want to end up in the water where the fish live … I will be researching a lot more about how to fight all these pests over the next few weeks as I want to eat our veggies and not leave it to the caterpillars and other bugs to eat them for me 
First fruits
We got ourselves a peach tree sometime ago and Danielle decided that she would make fruit trees in an urban area a pet-project of hers.
The tree has suffered a bit of neglect over the past 2 weeks with the birth of Ezequiel and our stay at the Hospital, it has however started yielding some peaches. We even had an “attack” by the palm tree, in which a branch fell on top of our little peach tree and damaged some of the branches and fruits. Our little tree resisted and repelled the attack .
We haven’t yet had time to try some of the fruits and I am betting they are delicious. We have been very lucky so far as it has rained quite a lot while we were away, with intermittent periods of sunshine to keep the tree fed properly and the fruit maturing.
Back home …
It’s been a while since I posted (this seems to be a recurrent theme, right?) and this time I have a decent excuse (not just “work was very busy” or something along those lines). Our son Ezequiel was born on Monday December 10th! A very cute little one. I know this is not related to the aquaponics adventures however how can one separate their lives so much.
The good news is that while we were at the hospital, the system took care of itself (I came home a few times during the week to feed the fish and that was all I did). The tomato plants are growing like crazy as well as all the seeds that we got from Greenharvest. I will post some pictures over the next day or so.
Colourful visitor
Originally uploaded by brunom
I haven’t really posted anything in a long time and even though there’s a lot of very interesting things happening in our lives (baby on the way, etc) I thought I would share the picture of a cute little visitor that came in one day to take a look at our aquaponic setup.
Check the Flickr set to see more images.