Aquaponic tragedy (or how to not trust just anybody)
We came back to Sydney for a couple of days to spend a bit of time, during these festive days, with Danielle’s family.
We have been away from Bondi for just 3 weeks but in the last week, we lost 10 out of our 11 fish! Apparently the main pump in the fish tank was slightly disconnected from the outlet and “appeared” as it wasn’t working. Danielle fiddled with it less than a minute and made it work.
The Silver Perch have been resistant for 14 months, they endured winter and my lack of attention for a while, soon after Zeek was born however, in the last 3 weeks, I entrusted their lives to people that didn’t really care about them, even though they told me in repeated occasions that they would look after them, feed them, make sure that everything was working. I guess, I made a mistake and now we only have one Silver Perch left, which is really unfortunate.
What I take of this experience, besides the fact that I should have probably not trusted the whole system to people that are not interested in aquaponics or in the fish for that matter, is that any system, no matter how resilient it is, still needs constant monitoring. And it does help to understand the basics on how the system works so that you can diagnose when something goes wrong.
It’s not the “end of the world” either, it’s a pretty big setback in our plans, but since we have moved up north, it’s now a good sign that we cannot have a system in Sydney and be living in the mid-north-coast.
Big Alligator
After 3+ years, someone saw something different in this picture and now I cannot see it any other way, it’s a big alligator! How amazing that after a while of having looked at this picture, uploaded it, etc … there’s still new things to be discovered.
I guess that there are many things that we haven’t really blogged about lately, like our move to Thora (near Bellingen in the mid-North Coast) and the change in my professional life … I think those are the subject of new posts. And, over the next year or so, we will adventure ourselves in a larger scale aquaponic system than the one we had in Bondi. The weather patterns here are quite different and there’s less pollution in the air, so I hope that our results will be superior. I will keep you posted.
Our move will slightly change the focus of this blog, it won’t just be about aquaponics and micro-farming in city blocks but rather about the life of city-dwellers attempting a “green/tree change” in a modern world.