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.

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.