Water restrictions? Not us!
We’re pretty close to the per person amount of water recommended during water restrictions…and we’re still growing!
Water
Keep ’em cool!
It’s 44° and blowing a gale. Is the garden prepared enough for this weather?
Down on water
It’s a joy to see our water use dropping. It means a smaller footprint, less expenses. We don’t compromise on our lifestyle though.
Last week in Ligaya Garden #8 and #9
A double edition because I got too carried away with other stuff. Food Underfoot 2019 (Gawler’s premiere weed walk) was a huge success with 3 attendees. We were given some solar gear to improve our setup, Lots of new shelving and a book purge completed the weeks.
One of my little inventions.
It’s a simple Spring water container to which I’ve drilled a hole in the base and fitted a 90mm PVC
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. You can’t have too much Azolla, so I made the decision to swap out the floating veggie bed with a new Azolla mesh bed. Now, we have twice as much Azolla growing and the space and nutrients aren’t being wasted on struggling plants. The Basil that was in the vegetable raft bed will make their way to the front garden. They’re a perennial, bush Basil type so should do well after a period of adjustment. We were lucky enough to get some thick, construction grade, Styrofoam from Andrew Hurst and his Habitat for Humanity project. This stuff will last for years so I’ll clean up
How we save nearly 2000 litres of water a year
It’s this simple! We all know that water is a valuable resource and one that shouldn’t be thrown away lightly. Some of us are still in mains water, so here’s a way to save quite a bit of that precious and increasingly expensive resource. The idea works for those on tank and bore water too. Here’s how we save a almost 2000 litres a year… The idea is simple. A 1 litre bottle of water placed in the cistern of a toilet will displace 1 litre of cistern water. That keeps the float valve always just a little bit higher, causing less water to flow into the cistern. I’m assuming you already have the float valve adjusted to the minimum. The pic above shows how easy it is. Just fill a bottle with water. pop the cistern lid, slide in the bottle where it won’t catch on anything like the float and pop the lid back on. The next time
Gary’s got a new home!
A couple of days ago we took out the backyard pond. It took lots of space and wasn’t very productive, so that space could be used for other things. While we were doing this, we needed to find a new home for the goldfish. That was easy, they went into the aquaponics (after a time in a bucket while they got used to the new water conditions). We found a Brown Tree Frog during our efforts too. The big question was what to do with our wandering crustacean, Gary the Yabby? Luckily, I’d just fitted a DIY solar fountain to the little pond in the front yard. It seemed most suitable for both Gary and the frog, so in they went. Gary was so happy with this turn of events that he actually refrained from his favourite game of ‘sever the finger’ while I popped him under the duckweed.
