Well, spring is in the air. I have been enjoying some great mixed salad greens almost every day at lunch. I also harvested the kohlrabi and the collards to make room for some tomatoes and peppers.

Here's what the current garden looks like:

Here's the 4x8 bed. As you can see, I am drowning in collard greens and the cabbages look almost ready to make sauerkraut out of.

Here's the smaller bed. The lettuce is doing great! I also planted some onions to see how they would do in an aquaponics bed. So far, not bad, but not great. Still debating over whether or not to pull them to make room for something more productive.

And here's the one that feeds the larger bed as well. I had some sort of rodent ravage the spinach, so it looks a bit sparse at the moment. I also have some onions planted here as well. This will wind up as my primary tomato bed as the spring progresses.

I still want to talk about my improved bell siphon. It is proving to be a really functional design. I hope to explain it in detail in a future post.

Well, we survived the winter and the garden is looking great!

For those who have been following along, I started with one media and one raft system so I could compare. I have decided that for me the media system is much better. So... I converted my raft system to a media bed. Now I have two beds made from the top section of the IBC totes used for the tank plus one large 4x8 bed that is being fed off of on of those systems.

I decided to experiment with onions this time around. Not sure how they will do in an aquaponics system, but so far they look happy. I planted half of each of the IBC tote beds with onions and the other half with mixed lettuce to start of the season.

My larger bed has been productive, even through the winter. I harvested a nice batch of chard a couple of weeks back. It was enough for 7 people to have a nice helping, and that was just from the bottom mature leaves. Those plants are almost ready for another harvest already!

I cleared out one of the collard green plants as it was kind of crowding the cabbage. It was darned tasty and made a little bit of room to tuck in another lettuce plant between the cabbage and the chard.

Between the more mature lettuce in the large bed and the bottom leaves of the newer lettuces in the IBC tote beds, I have already harvested two nice bags of mixed greens. I had some of those for lunch today and they were delicious.

I'll do my best to post some pics soon along with a nice design I have come up with for a much better bell siphon.

Happy gardening!