It took a while, but they are here… switching circuits for the rainwater. Once we connect one of the rain tanks to the kitchen and toilet, we can slash our town water even further without the need to bucket the rainwater in. Along with a couple of float switches, there boards will let me wire…
Category: water
water
Lotsa baby snails…
Looks like the aquatic snails have been having fun. Lots of eggs under the Styrofoam harvesting floats is a good sign. I’m breeding them in otherwise unused tubs so that they can give the chooks a little extra meat and calcium. Maybe I can flog a few off too when I have enough. I got…
Watering in Winter?
It might seem counterintuitive but late Winter and early Spring are excellent times to start your watering regime for the warm weather. Unless you garden in wicking beds, this is the time to check down into the soil to see how much moisture is held in the ground. The preoccupation with mulch that some gardeners…
Modularity rules!
One of the great things about aquaponics is that you can design a high degree of modularity and redundancy into your system. Am example is our floating raft beds – the plants in them aren’t doing so well now that the cooler weather is here. I noticed that, in these conditions, the Azolla was thriving….
Busy times…
It’s been a busy week here. I’ve added a second tap in the front yard and divided the drip irrigation into three, smaller, sectors each with its own tap. This should make water use a lot more efficient next Summer as we can easily isolate parts of the garden now in case the weather gets…
Capturing the washing water
It might not look like much, but this drum, bit of pipe and reclaimed hose can save us heaps. It’s simply a way to catch the washing machine water, let it settle, then send it to the garden. We don’t use hot water in our machine which has a 4.5 star water rating and uses…
Vlog 3: Surviving the heat
It’s the last Vlog of the year and it’s a hot one. This time, I cover the ways we keep the garden and critters watered and cool. At this stage of the game, we don’t need to artificially shade any of the plants. The garden was designed so that after two or three years, the…
Where’s the ‘How to’s’?
I’ve been spending a lot of the hot weather redoing some of the blog – new theme, upgraded plan, all that good stuff. While I’ve been at it, I’ve been checking out lots and lots of other people’s blogs. I’ve noticed that there are soooo many ‘How to…’ posts and videos out there. When I…
Bare Earth… No way!
I’ve been sharing this pic around because it’s an unusual event in the garden. When we bought the block, the first thing we did was cover the whole front yard with layers of newspaper and about 10cm (that’s 4″ in the old measurement) of compost and mulch. After a frustrating wait of a few days,…
Winter aquaponics update
A quick Winter update on the aquaponics system. It’s hanging in there over the cold weather with only natural daylight and no covering. The Winter has been pretty mild so far and only the Kangkong is suffering, but it’s doing better thsn expected when you consider it’s a tropical kind of plant. The basic…
