Skeg in the hills

jayendra

The novelty of pipe work and water coming and going never wears off.
A bumper crop is awesome

Fish is zen
A cleanup and fresh planting bed is all I need to reinvigorate my needs.

What gets me down is plant deficiencies and over grow pants that I feel I need to keep.

Garlic - try a Dutch bucket like robbob's ginger and galalgal videos.
Strawberries - NFT?

skeggley

Gunagulla wrote:

are you adding any Potassium to the system at all? That should get strawberry fruiting underway as long as the other nutrients are at reasonable levels.

I top up the system with scheme water at pH 8 and the only potassium I know of is bicarbonate which of course raises the pH. Apart from banana peel is there something else potassium I can add? Not sure about other nutes, but there doesn't appear to be any visible deficiencies, everything appears to be growing fine. I will start spraying eco fungicide and see how that goes, thanks for the tip Gunna. :thumbright:

I've tried garlic in the wicking beds also and still have no joy. I try to use market garlic. I agree clearing the bed and replanting does give me satisfaction but in this weather seedlings would cook so I'm waiting for it to cool down some before clearing and replanting.
I have new priorities over expanding now but keep looking at the spare BYAP gb and thinking dwc... I've been led to believe that my spare bed is one of the first made by BYAP so it has some history that needs continuing. Sometime.

Thanks for the input guys. :wave:

jayendra

You could try a localised small bag of potash buried near the strawberries

Gunagulla

Dunno why you aren't having success with garlic, it grows really well in my gravel GBs.

Potassium chloride is a potential source of K, and the Cl wont hurt either- better than adding NaCl, since plants don't need extra Sodium.

MartinC

Good to see you're still going Skeg. How is the system now?

skeggley

Gidday Martin, hope alls well.
The larger system is still ticking over but the smaller one is idle. No fish in it and I'm deciding whether to sell it or move it.
Still havnt had a silver perch yet so the large tank is full of fish and really needs thinning out. No trout this year, it seems Troutman slipped through without my knowledge so no trout this year for the first time. I still have trout in the freezer so no biggie.
Still having issues with roots getting into the buried pipe work which has the blue barrel addition out of action also.
I'm still planting in the other beds and it just keeps doing its thing which is why I like AP!

joblow

Great to hear you're still about Skeg.

gtkmarine

Good to hear from you again Skeg.
Yes, once the AP system is established they keep on producing abundant veg.
How old are the perch now ? Kg+ I guess.
Did Troutman have a carpark sale this year ?
I finally got my act together & did a bee keeping course @ the local Tafe. Now I have a established bee hive with a super with a few frames of honey.

Attachment:

Bee hive.JPG [ 272.64 KiB | Viewed 3536 times ]

Hoping to get down to Perth @ some stage to catch some wild Pearl Cichlids from the Canning river.
:wave:

skeggley

Hiya GTK, great to hear you have joined the bee scene, well done, another addiction!
The perch would be around 3 years or so and the sizes range from big to small.

Honestly I don't know the big ones seem to be well over 300mm now and are still eating through winter which they've not done before.
Not sure if TM did Chieldys this year, I've given the heads up last few years and the initiative hasn't been taken so gave up. Not even a trout brag thread last year..... Enthusiasm injections are required for AP to grow, it seems to be dwindling around these parts nowadays.
When you're down this way say G'day.
Hey Joblow, nice to see you're still around also, Oz seems to have gone quiet! Yeah things get in the way and life gets busy but hey, when you're on a winner it's hard to get off, can't see me giving away this hobby, I tried to get some soil beds going again but it only reminded me how much easier a balanced AP system is.

And by the way Martin, stop lurking and hurry up and get an AP system going, surely you've done enough research by now...

joblow

Good on you Skeg,

Once you go AP there's no turnning back.

I know what you mean about those soil beds, as any AP'er would tell you, you need to continuously water and weed them, plus digging them there's always that risk of a back injury, there's no comparison :laughing3:

scotty435

Hope you enjoy the beekeeping as much as I do - the bees are neat to watch. I did a year with a regular Langstroth hive before losing the bees in that hive in mid February (near the end of our winter). I skipped a year and before I got going again I decided I didn't like lifting the Langstroth deeps so now I'm running three Langstroth long hives that I made from scrap lumber (two started from package bees and one is a caught swarm). They use deep frames. No lifting but I can put three regular supers on each if I want to do some lifting (sort of defeats the purpose of going with a long hive though). So far so good :thumbright:

joblow

Scotty & Gtkmarine,

This is the Bee Hive you guys need, I've got a mate with one of these and he reckons it's absolutely brilliant.

He got his hive cheap because he donated to their GoFundMe site.

I'm almost tempted to get a hive myself if it's that easy.

skeggley

I got the heads up on this forum about the Flow hive from Stuart C and also funded the original campaign so have one. And when they did a special I got another, and another....
And all I wanted was one hive and honey on tap and curiously I got neither. Up to five colonies now, saleable honey and looking at a bumper crop this spring. So much learning all things bee for the last few years it's lucky AP looks after itself!
Such good conditions here for keeping bees, year round forage, two of the best honeys, jarrah and marri, no mites, no beetles, no worries.
Bee keepers are a strange bunch though...

scotty435

I decided to wait and see how people like them - they were a bit too expensive for me at the time I first read about them. I would like to add some so I may modify my hives at some point in the future to take flow frames or I may just add a single super with them and let the bees have the rest of the honey. The less I have to go in and disturb the ladies the better

.

skeggley

Hiya Scotty, there have been teething issues, poor woodwork joints, leaking frames and the like but most has been ironed out.
One of the issues was the way it was marketed as honey on tap and this is not so as you would know that bee husbandry is most important, honey second. Chinese fakes are also flooding he ma Return and nothing can be guaranteed with them and Flow takes the bad press when they fail.
All in all I'm satisfied with the Flow extraction method, a bit of study and a lot of questions on the Flow forum has made me into a beek. It's said Flow honey tastes better as there is less air contact and I'm inclined to agree. But yes expensive. Still cheaper than an AP set up from the shops though.

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Skeg in the hills

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Skeg in the hills

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