And were off

Added some fish. Tilapia today and some banana plants 2 number.  We put those in first last night. Not possibly the correct order of doing things but could not wait. Wanna added some seeds so now we wait to see if anything will grow. Interesting and strange the pump cuts out when I turn on the florescent light which is on the same circuit.  Any ideas why this should happen?

April 11th Where were at

Been putting off the additional shade cloth installation till a cooler day. Well can only wait so long and today was a bit cooler around 36Deg... So added in some 80% shade cloth to the steel frame above the raft system, and then Wanna added in the seeds.

I checked the Ph, just shy of 8 and the Nitrates and Nitrites around 0.3 and 0-12.5 respectively. So within a reasonable margin. I also used my hydroponic EC meter.  940 PMM sees a bit on the low side but adequate for salads. Not I suspect for Tomatoes. So wed planned accordingly and Wanna had prepared seeds adding in Bak Choi (Thai) and, Bak Choi (Vietnamese) and some other greens used locally for stir frys. This time we used new seeds. Earlier we used up our old ones and all the packets has a use by date, we exceeded them all by a few years..... So little success earlier and really we cannot be to surprised.

Since we started this second system I had always planned to keep tidy and well organised. However we also started with the premise that we would do it as cheaply as possible not a completely compatible idea out the the garden environment. So slowly we have made improvements. Ive put the tanks on a concrete base and added a small concrete path round the side of the Grown beds.  We also have lighting and spare electric sockets. So now beginning to look the part. All these extras being done while we completed the house, again keeping costs low and using up all the surplus bits from house construction. Amazing have you ever noticed how much waste is generated in house construction, meters of electrical cable for a start and short lengths of plastic water pipe.  Well I think I found a use for most of it.....

Also with the revamp weve drilled holes in the deliver pipes from fish tank to settlement tank to avoid air blockage which was a bit of a problem, Cleaned out the aeration tank and added proper bio balls instead of old plastic cuttings from water pipe...Ive added  a short slide show of todays status. Main thing to watch over coming weeks will be the plant progress. Having been very slack on counting fish numbers and mortality etc I can only guess at food quantities, if they come for food I feed them..

If I Knew You Were Coming Id Have Made Waffles

Hello weekend breakfast

There are waffles and then there are WAFFLES. Prepare the batter and let it sits overnight for a rich crispy waffle. Yeasted pecan waffles will make all other waffles seem like cardboard toaster eggos. You can just let them go, no problem-o.

Yeasted Pecan Waffles

1/4 cup warm water (105–115°F)
1 (2 1/4 tsp) package active dry yeast
2 tblsp sugar
6 large eggs
1 qt well-shaken buttermilk
1/3 cup vegetable oil plus some to grease the waffle iron
3 cups flour
1/4 cup corn meal
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup toasted pecans, coarsley chopped

Run the tap until water is warm. Water should be to the touch when dripped on your wrist. Combind yeast and water in a bowl. Let sit until foamy about 5 minutes. This is called proofing your yeast. If the yeast doesnt foam up throw it out. The yeast is either expired or the water was too warm. Mix sugar, eggs, buttermilk, and oil into yeast. In a seperate bowl add flour, corn meal, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and stir to combine. Add wet yeast mixture to the dry ingredients. Mix until combind but a little lumpy. Chill overnight or at least 5 hours.

Puffy and bubbly yeasted batter

When its waffle time brush griddle with oil and heat on high. Fold 3/4 cup of pecans into batter, reserving some to sprinkle on top.

Grandmas waffle iron, preheating and still cookin for over 30 years

Pour batter in cupfuls over the waffle iron, so it spreads evenly. Close and let cook for 8-10 minutes until waffles are medium brown. Cooking times vary per iron, so expect the first waffle to be a "test waffle," or your first waffle before your household catches a whiff of heavenly waffle smell. Serve waffles with maple syrup and extra pecans.

Almost waffle time, expect a crowd

Were off Construction Episode 1 of

Following about 4 readings and rereading of Traviss Book and staring at the diagrams. I kept pondering...Wanna very clearly told me to stop talking about it and walk the walk...No more ifs or buts. Not even a what if?.... Just do it. Well hope you can follow that. Were off.

This is a photo taken from Travis Hughey Manual Barrel Ponics.

Its what I am intending to make. Thats the last of his pictures on here. (Promise). From now on this Blog will have my photos. You have to follow me....
Sunday morning and all house hold chores done. Finally run out of excuses to do nothing but read the book!!!!
First step locate my tools. Id brought them back down from Khon Kaen but they had been sitting in a big plastic box for well over 3 years. Would they still work was the question? Only one way to find out. Plug them in and pull the trigger. Fine all going well. So far so good.
So first job. Buy the plastic drums. Nothing for it but to go down the local second hand plastic yard and buy 3 x 200 litre plastic drums. In Thailand for some reason all plastic drums and pipe work comes in blue except for some yellow conduit used for electrical works.

11.00am finds us entering a seedy dirty old yard. In fact I only took one photo on the outside. But they had the goods. 3 drums for 1260 Baht. (Thats 30US$). Complete with oil and various other unrecognised residues which will require cleaning out and disposing.

11.30 hrs see us returning back home, to empty out the oil? Cleaning fluid? Whatever?... and then down to the real the job of cutting. There we were cutting up plastic drums and washing them out with detergent. All going well. Ghan was helping me on this, making life much easier. We decided to use my circular saw for the cutting. Easy, and if careful gives a good straight cut.I need to tell you. By 14.30 we had filled up the drums with washing powder and scrubbed the outside to remove the general dirt etc. Then left them to soak. Will leave them a few days. No rush. Im back to work tomorrow.Done. Step one complete. (Thats step one according to Travis I might add!).

This also gives me time to organise a frame for the drums and buy the various plastic fitting. For the frame I had asked a contractor at work to help me on this. Lets hope he come through on this as it will make things so much easier. So I had cheated a bit insofar as I had asked the contractor at work to make me a steel frame at support these drums. Much easier then wood and no problems with termites etc. (Taking the long term view....). He was very happy to help. Even thought when I explained my request for a fish tank he seemed somewhat bemused.

Well the usual story I gave a sketch and got well. Look at the photo. Its a massive piece of structural steel more at home on the construction site than in my back yard. But Hey! No complaints as it was done with much kindness and they will get put to good use supporting my new venture.

So thats the plastic sorted out. Next off to buy and install the necessary fittings. Thats Episode 2...And another day...

And The Plants are Growing

Been standing around almost wishing I could see the plants grow. I know every day bit by bit... So Im pleased with progress. I do still need to get a better filter system in place to avoid solids going into the plants.  Ive tried along with bio balls, to add some additional filter cloth and covered the flow pipe to the plants with a fine mesh.  Latter works fine but keeps blocking up quickly. Ill be giving this some more thought. Need a bigger surface area for the filter fabric.

Fish look happy and always ready for a feed. Plants, well I have not heard any complain to me yet....

A Moment Of Madness

Twittering while cooking

...or eating while reading. Follow me on Twitter.

Mainstream Aquaponics New York Times

The New York Times has just published an article on Aquaponics and sighted Travis Hughly. Aquaponics

Not sure Im allowed to copy this into my Web but it is a fantastic aticle and shows the way forward for Aquaponics. The whole backyard thing seems to been inspired by Travis Hughly more than most so a big thanks to him.
==========================

Copy of article here goes.....

February 17, 2010

The Spotless Garden
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

THERE’S a “Beyond Thunderdome” quality to Rob Torcellini’s greenhouse. The 10-by-12-foot structure is undistinguished on the outside: he built it from a $700 kit, alongside his family’s Victorian-style farmhouse in Eastford, Conn., a former farming town 35 miles east of Hartford. What is going on inside, however, is either a glimpse at the future of food growing or a very strange hobby — possibly both.
There are fish here, for one thing, shivering through the winter, and a jerry-built system of tanks, heaters, pumps, pipes and gravel beds. The greenhouse vents run on a $20 pair of recycled windshield wiper motors, and a thermostat system sends Mr. Torcellini e-mail alerts when the temperature drops below 36 degrees. Some 500 gallons of water fill a pair of food-grade polyethylene drums that he scavenged from a light-industry park.
Mr. Torcellini’s greenhouse wouldn’t look out of place on a wayward space station where pioneers have gone to escape the cannibal gangs back on Earth. But then, in a literal sense, Mr. Torcellini, a 41-year-old I.T. director for an industrial manufacturer, has left earth — that is, dirt — behind.
What feeds his winter crop of lettuce is recirculating water from the 150-gallon fish tank and the waste generated by his 20 jumbo goldfish. Wastewater is what fertilizes the 27 strawberry plants from last summer, too. They occupy little cubbies in a seven-foot-tall PVC pipe. When the temperature begins to climb in the spring, he will plant the rest of the gravel containers with beans, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers — all the things many other gardeners grow outside.
In here, though, the yields are otherworldly. “We actually kept a tally of how many cherry tomatoes we grew,” Mr. Torcellini said of last summer’s crop. “And from one plant, it was 347.” A trio of cucumber plants threw off 175 cukes.
If that kind of bounty sounds hard to believe, Mr. Torcellini has a YouTube channel to demonstrate it. “There’s alternate ways of growing food,” he said. “I don’t want to push it down people’s throats, but if someone’s interested, I’d like to show them you can do this with cheap parts and a little bit of Yankee ingenuity.”
It’s all part of a home experiment he is conducting in a form of year-round, sustainable agriculture called aquaponics — a neologism that combines hydroponics (or water-based planting) and aquaculture (fish cultivation) — which has recently attracted a zealous following of kitchen gardeners, futurists, tinkerers and practical environmentalists.
And Australians — a lot of Australians.
In Australia, where gardeners have grappled with droughts for a decade, aquaponics is particularly appealing because it requires 80 to 90 percent less water than traditional growing methods. (The movement’s antipodean think tank is a Web site called Backyard Aquaponics, where readers can learn how, say, to turn a swimming pool into a fish pond.)
In the United States, aquaponics is in its fingerling stage, yet it seems to be increasing in popularity. Rebecca Nelson, 45, half of the company Nelson &Pade, publishes the Aquaponics Journal and sells aquaponics systems in Montello, Wis. While she refused to disclose exact sales figures, Ms. Nelson said that subscriptions have doubled every year for the last five years, and now number in the thousands. Having worked in the industry since 1997, leading workshops and consulting with academics, she estimates that there may be 800 to 1,200 aquaponics set-ups in American homes and yards and perhaps another 1,000 bubbling away in school science classrooms.
One of Ms. Nelson’s industry colleagues, Sylvia Bernstein, who helped develop a mass-market hydroponic product called the AeroGarden, recently turned her attention to aquaponics. She has started her own YouTube channel and a blog (aquaponicgardening.wordpress.com) and is teaching aquaponics at the Denver Botanic Gardens. She said she has done market research that suggests the technology may appeal to a half-dozen consumer types, including those seeking fresh winter herbs; gadget-happy gardeners; and high-income parents and their science-fair kids. But primarily, she envisions aquaponics as catnip for “the LOHAS market,” she said. “That means Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability — the green crowd.”
It’s worth mentioning that most of those categories would appear to describe the 47-year-old Ms. Bernstein. She built her first aquaponics system with her 15-year-old son on a concrete pad outside her remodeled 1970s-era Boulder, Colo., home. And she has since set up quarters in a 240-square-foot greenhouse. While she boasted about picking fresh basil the other day for a risotto, she has lately been preoccupied with exotic fish. Having tired of tilapia and trout, Ms. Bernstein is now introducing pacu, a thin, silvery import from South America that she called “a vegetarian piranha.”
Aquaponics is addictive, Ms. Bernstein believes, and it has a way of becoming a full-time pursuit. “If you spend some time on Backyard Aquaponics,” she said, “people start with this little 100-gallon backyard system. But it never stays that way. Next thing, they’ll say, the tilapia were really cool, but I want to grow trout.”
Interested in aquaponics, but not ready to make it a life calling? No problem. An Atlanta company called Earth Solutions now sells kits online, on Amazon.com and the Home Depot’s Web site. Called Farm in a Box, they range in price from $268 to $3,000, and come with pipes, pumps, frames and fittings. David Epstein, 50, the osteopath and entrepreneur who invented Farm in a Box, reports that the company has sold several hundred units since the product went on sale last March.
Dr. Dave, as he likes to be called, created Farm in a Box after studying a do-it-yourself manual written by Travis W. Hughey — a creative debt that bothers Mr. Hughey not a bit.
Mr. Hughey, 49, is not just another proselytizer for aquaponics but, in his words, an “agri-missionary” who hopes to help feed the developing world. His free step-by-step plans have been downloaded more than 15,000 times since he started his site, Faith and Sustainable Technologies (fastonline.org), in 2007.
Mr. Hughey credits researchers at North Carolina State University for building the prototype that started the modern aquaponics movement some 25 years ago. By comparison, he came to aquaponics with little more than an unfinished biology degree at Oral Roberts University and a background in yacht repair, a career that required him to be “a jack of all trades, and a master of every one of them.”
The low-tech, low-cost design for his “Barrel-Ponics Manual” can be built out of three 55-gallon barrels, a pump, a wooden frame and some off-the-shelf hardware. One barrel, which sits on the ground, holds the fish. A second — split in half and filled with gravel — holds the plants. The final barrel, a storage or flush tank, perches above the other two like a toilet tank. The effluent-rich water that flows from one receptacle to the next is the life of the system, flooding the plants with nutrients and then trickling back into the fish tank.
From these rudiments, all manner of aquaponics systems can be built. Mr. Hughey has nine of them going in a demonstration greenhouse outside the double-wide mobile home he shares with his wife and two daughters in Andrews, S.C. He has grown everything from radishes to a papaya tree in those barrels. Of course, his family could also eat the tilapia swimming around the 1,000-gallon in-ground plastic tank. But he’s saving them to use as brood stock.
Mr. Hughey figures that other aquanauts will need to buy fingerlings from somewhere. He’s starting to sell assembled Barrel-Ponics kits, too, for $495, plus shipping.
This winter, he has begun construction on a pair of 1,200-square-foot aquaponics greenhouses to raise produce for the local natural foods market. Each one will take 80 barrel halves, 9 tons of gravel and a 3,000-gallon tilapia tank. The power for the pumps and heaters will come from a “hand-built” biodiesel generator. Mr. Hughey already has the fuel sitting in the yard: 12,000 gallons of vegetable oil that passed its expiration date.
He isn’t exactly stocking up for the end times. But with the way the economy is going, he said, it might not be a bad idea to have a backup plan to feed his family and neighbors. “I’m trying to make this place as self-reliant as possible,” he said. “But ultimately, self-reliance isn’t possible unless it’s profitable.”
There is something about aquaponics that seems to inspire this quirky blend of entrepreneurialism, environmentalism and survivalism. Even a mainstream businesswoman like Ms. Bernstein points to the water shortages in farming areas like the Central Valley in California — “to say nothing of Africa,” she added.
Jack Rowland can imagine a day when aquaponics set-ups could be built into new apartment complexes and be fed by municipal waste and geothermal power. In the meantime, he has started his own 1,200-gallon tilapia hatchery in his family’s unfinished basement in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., about 10 miles south of Poughkeepsie. He houses the fish in black cattle troughs, which have proved to be sturdy and nontoxic. A stock tank heater keeps the water at a comfortable 75 degrees.
Tilapia will tolerate crowding and will feast on your table scraps. (“They’re the ultimate garbage disposal unit,” Mr. Rowland said.) But, being tropical by nature, they die in the cold.
One of the pools is called the Dinner Tank. It is here that Mr. Rowland condemns his tilapia to a five-day fast before they make their way to the frying pan or the broiler. Tilapia, he said, do not deserve their bad reputation among cooks as the white bread of the waterways — mealy, pale and bland — but “you have to purge them or they taste gamey.”
“Most of the tilapia sold here was harvested months ago in China,” he said. “It’s like eating a fresh tomato versus what you buy in the grocery store.”
This summer, he hopes to transfer his operation from a spot next to the washer and dryer to a 50-foot-long hoop greenhouse. But he’s going about the project carefully. This attention to detail will most likely comfort Mr. Rowland’s neighbors: in his day job, Mr. Rowland, 57, is an outage planner for the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
Though Mr. Rowland spends perhaps an hour a night in the basement, looking for floaters and new spawn, he knows that no system is fail-safe. Pumps break, heaters go haywire. The art of aquaponics is one of trial and error.
“My mentor in the tilapia world told me I really wouldn’t be a master of tilapia until I killed at least a million fish,” he said. “I’m not there yet.”