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.
