Healing Garden Aquaponics in Adelaide, South Australia

chillidude

Sejin wrote:

I also had to be sure of the success in my own experiment with aquaponics before inviting others.

I think you've nailed that one Sejin ! Fantastic looking system.

DrLuke wrote:

I recon it's turning into one of the byap forums great member threads.

Yep, I'm coming around to that opinion too !

green troll

Sejin wrote:

Oh, on this matter, i should report that Bret viewtopic.php?f=18&t=12233
was an electrical and cabling contractor who did internet cabling for my new house. The green village is also an "optical cable estate". All houses here have extensive cabling and energy use is monitered at a community level as well as individual house level. Bret came to do the final piece of cabling work on my house, and saw my aquaponics sep up. He was instantly hooked, before ever reading our forum entries.

But Bret probably had a favourable disposition because he already had a vegie garden and an aquarium, i think.

Sejin

So ive got you to blame ay...
But your right. As soon as I saw your setup I was hooked,i also got first hand info and my questions answered which made it easy to start.
It also made sense to combine my hobbies of fish keeping and vegie gardening into one.
Thanks mate.

Sent from Brett's Galaxy using Tapatalk

Sejin

DrLuke wrote:

The speed at which you have got such a beautiful tidy system up and running is a credit to u.

DrLuke,

Thanks for complement.
I am actually surprised at myself.
I guess I was hooked, and spent too much time reading and preparing for my AP set up, in fact, at the expense of other matters that I should have attended.
I still consider the current state of my set up a half way to my eventual goal.
I keep wondering how some set ups are so successful and try to learn from them and come up some hybrid combination of my own.
Ultimately, for me it is a question of how to a garden where "healing" takes place.
But I find there is a lot of that in the process of dreaming about it.
I wonder whether no healing takes place after completion?
That would be ironic.

Sejin

BullwinkleII

If that's true, you can always start converting the community garden and the large wetland into an aquaponics system.

That should keep you healing for a few years at least:)

Sejin

BullwinkleII wrote:

If that's true, you can always start converting the community garden and the large wetland into an aquaponics system.
That should keep you healing for a few years at least:)

Ha, ha, ha. That may be true.
Perhaps, that is why I am thinking about North Korea.
A lot to do there, I suppose.

Converting the community garden may be a practice run.

Perhaps too much politics in both places.

Sejin

Sejin

Nothing special to report but I thought I would leave a routine record for my own reference in future.
1] First, how my 3months old system looks now from one side.

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From this angle, which is from South, one can see tall plants, tomato on the left side and cucumber on the right side.
2] Cucumber fruit which used to die at baby size are getting bigger to due manual pollination. Thanks for BW for mentioning pollination. Here are two views.

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I now have about 10 cucumber fruiting beyond baby size. I will wait until they become about 25 cm before harvesting.

I have now established a continous supply and consumption pattern for lettuce of four different varieties. Although I have about 5 strawberry plants and some of them flourished, I have never seen fruit yet. Perhaps the planting time was too late in season.

Sejin

a routine report for two new grow beds in high shelves.

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BullwinkleII

Nice to see the cucumbers!!

I think I have one that has made it past the critical stage.

What method are you using to pollinate?

I used a cotton bud that I keep in a jar and use it on anything I have tried to hand pollination. I figure eventually it will gain it's own genetic diversity and be a more useful tool with time.

Sejin

I have been battling with fish fungus. Two things I tried are:
1] salt bath in a quarantine container
2] adding Melafix to pond.

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I tried salt bath first for all goldfish (nearly 100) in a quaranteen container for a week, then I put them back to pond. Then I added a dose of Melafix to pond every day. However the result was negligible. The fungus affected fish did not get better. Some big goldfish had white spots and the spots were getting larger in size and more numerous over time. But due to larger size, bigger fish did not show abnormal behaviour. But smaller gold fish were more sensitive. Some of them were losing a part of fins, and some part of flesh were pilling off for some.

I began to catch the affected fish to put back to the salt bath container. I started with small ones, then gradually adding bigger ones as I caught them. This time, I applied much stronger dose of salt, about three times of the recommened dose. Nevertheless, some small ones died. Some large ones that appeared to be getting better were returned to pond. But even the big ones that had additional salt bath had while spots growing after returning to pond. I tried to clean the pond and tried to catch them and put back for more salt bath.

I am not sure how many gold fish I got now. I lost the count. Perhaps about 70 in total with about 20 large ones. I will not be adding new ones until the situation stabilises. It is not a crisis, but a battle. Also a learning process.

Sejin

BullwinkleII wrote:

What method are you using to pollinate?

I use water colour paint brush, may be it is an oriental caligraphy brush.

Sejin

BullwinkleII

Have you done water tests?

If so what results did you see?

More often than not, all the bacteria, parasites, fungus, and viruses are present everywhere, but it's some final stress that tips the balance between the fish (or humans for that matter*) being susceptible to an outbreak. Even something like pH can give some beasty or another a foothold in a fish with a slightly weakened immune system.

*Just by way of example from wikipedia on Golden Staph...

"
It is frequently found as part of the normal skin flora on the skin and nasal passages.[1] It is estimated that 20% of the human population are long-term carriers of S. aureus.
"

You just need to be weakened in some way and everything is already cued up ready to rot one of your fins off, or eat your eye at the first hint of opportunity.

CorporalChaos

Get some chelated iron to solve the yellowing of leaves you have going on there. Besides that and your fish problems, the system looks great.

Sejin

A brief report this week since no new development. For more than three weeks, I have been too busy to connect the grow beds in the third expanded part of my system along the long fence.
The gold fish infected with fungus more seriously have been placed a quatanteen container with salted water. Water is totally changed every day and water is salted each time at a very high level. But I did not notice an obvious improvement. Some small fish died. Big ones do not die easily, but did not get much better. However, they did not get much worse either. That may be something. Today, I returned the most healthy looking ones back to the pond even though they still have white spots. As for the ones in poorer condition, I caught them one pass one and gave a coating of Melafix with a brush on the fungus affected areas.

This weeks pictures are from the harvest of bok choi and Italian parsley from the grow bed in the high shelve. They are five weeks old from planting seedlings. I pulled out and placed them on dinner table in bowl and bottle with water as in flower base. They will stay there for look until they are consumed.

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Not bad as a substitute for a flower base on dinner table. It will keep vegies fresh at least for one or wo days.

I have planted enough bok choi to have a steady flow of supply. I noticed that we do not consume enough basil so that basil grew too tall and creating shade, so I pulled out two of out six basil plants.

I now have quite a few tomatos and cucumbers, but I may have to wait two to three more weeks until I begin to harvest them.

Sejin

bunson

I'm yet to try this trick (I only heard about last night) but if you pull the herbs etc and place them straight into a vase/container which contains a few ice blocks and 1/2 an aspirin, they apparently last a lot longer? Apparently it's a method learned from people keeping roses in vases?

I'm going to give it a try when next I need to pull something out, but then again, if I want parsley I just walk outside and grab it straight out of the bed...

Charlie

Such a beatiful system :thumbright:

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