Greenbackyard

The ultimate survivor

New tank

A few days ago we stood in front of our aquaponics system, looking dubiously into the stinky water. It was like looking into a tank of raw green sludge. The bottom was hidden under a depth of brack-ish green water. Mosquito larvae wriggled in the still, scum laden rainwater tank. No food had been dropped into the tank in months. Our plant beds were like little deserts – with a few weedy herbs clawing at the sky. Surely nothing could survive in such a toxic environment?

My brother made it clear he wanted the tank of water to go. Since the tank was right next to his room, he had a point. We knew that 10 of the 11 eleven original fish had perished. But what if that last fish was still alive? Surviving like a fishy Chuck Norris, deep in the tank? Tenaciously clinging to life like a Rambo – how could we get rid of the tank (or at least clean it out and reuse it) if, somewhere down there, it lived! We looked into the tank and our doubts were almost palpable. Surely, it had to be dead?

We started to drain the tank. Long hair like strands of green filaments coated the sides of the tank – I could only compare it to seaweed. The water didn’t get any clearer, but odd things emerged, like half sunken wrecks. As we got down to the last third, we stopped emptying the tank and got a big stick and had a bit of a poke around – juuuuuuusssssst in case…..

Suddenly, like a black shadow, out he darted!! I let out an excited yell. It made my day to find he was still there, incredibly, still fighting fit and swift as a flash of light. What a stayer! As my brother Stephen said (after whom we named every fish) – what a Highlander he is. “There can be… only one!” So we refilled the tank a bit and then had a good chat about what to do next.

The thing is, we need to transport the Highlander Fish to our new house and eventually build it a new aquaponics system – but our new house is 8 hours away. That’s a hard thing to do… Get it out of the swamp (er… current tank), get it into some in-between-time tank and then get it up to our new house and THEN get it into it’s long term accommodation. I sure will not be able to eat Highlander after this, he’s almost like family now, (and about as much trouble. And probably about as crazy.)

Anyway, we went out and bought a new fish tank for him. You can see the photo here. We need to leave it a week with a pump in it to settle down, before we transfer him into it, and finally clean the big tank. More on this saga later. I really hope that after living for so long in a toxic pool he doesn’t cark it the moment we introduce him to properly oxygenated water.

New tanks, new plans, new idea?

We’ve been thinking about a new aquaponics system – a phase 2 set-up. Ofcourse we only have a sketch on a back of a napkin at the moment, (so many good plans start like that!) but we’re thinking of a bigger system than our initial prototype we set up in the backyard in our last house.

A bigger set up will give us the chance to learn about medium size set-ups work. For instance, we can get an idea about how to scale up the technical stuff, such as the sort of the pumps we’ll need, how the beds full of vegetables will respond to the Bellingen climate, and what sort of problems a medium size rig will create (not that we are anticipating any, but its good to allow for the unforeseen.)

In the winter, it gets cold around where we are. Well, by cold I mean about 0 or just below – that’s centigrade. Not so cold by the standards of many of our friends, but that’s cold for a beach girl. It will be cold for our plants too – and our fish. Dealing with that cold will be new for us.

Perhaps one piece of the puzzle will be to use a marquee-tent that I found on on ebay. It might act as a makeshift housing for the tanks, (and possibly some beds), and by crikey we’d have to stake it down properly. But it might also act as a greenhouse within the tent, raising the temperature and stopping frost. I wonder if this will work?

Marquee from KMATE - look for it on Ebay

New shoots

A few weeks back we took some drastic measures and cleaned up most of the growbeds. Why? Well it’s spring, all our winter crops had already yielded (broccoli, etc) and, to be honest, it was just out of control, not in the sense that nature needs to be controlled but in the sense that some plants were dead or dying and sometimes a pruning process is required. That’s what we did, we removed the old tomato plants, old basil and removed dead roots, etc . After that well needed pruning, I planted some basil and coriander seeds that we got from greenharvest.com and, less than a week later we already have little green spots.

Guess what’s ready?

Nom nom

Status as of August

This morning, after a long and beautiful walk along the cliffs, I thought it was time to head to our backyard and check the current status of our litlle project as, since Zeek was born, most of our attention has been going to the little man.

Well, the good thing is that an aquaponics system seems to need very little maintenance, at least when the stocking density is low, like it is in our case. The tomatoes are ripening, the brocolli is flowering, the peas are growing and the fish are all alive and kicking.

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.