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!

First freeze in Austin!

Ok, we had our first freeze here. It got into the 20's the past couple of nights. I covered the new larger bed with plastic. Everything seemed to do just fine. However, the tops of a couple of the plants got nipped.

My neighbor also covered his conventional beds. He has also been spraying Neem oil to keep down the caterpillars. Alas, the combination of my neighbors neem oil and my nice cozy plastic housing seems to have attracted every caterpillar on the block. They had a great little party in my cozy shelter. While my collards did just fine against the cold, they were no match for the little buggers. So... a nice dose of neem oil on my plants as well. EAT THAT YOU LITTLE BUGGERS!!!!

I went ahead and removed the tall okra plants from the smaller IBC tote bed attached to the new large bed. I also harvested the basil, a nice eggplant, and several jalapinos. This works out since I have been wanting to clear that bed anyway  and start afresh there.

In that particular bed I have a large sized heater element meant for tropical fish tanks. It seems to have been just enough for the fish to survive. However, in my other IBC tote system I did not have time to score a heater. Yep, you guessed it, I woke up to a tank full of fishcicles this morning. No worries though. This was expected. They were all still quite fresh, and a couple even did a meager kick when I fished them out of the tank. They will be the main course for a few meals in the future. Easiest fish harvest ever!

Ok, haven't posted anything in awhile as I have been in the midst of the great kitchen remodel, but there has been some excellent happenings in the aqaponics system(s).

I harvested the eggplant last week and Jennifer made an absolutely wonderful eggplant parmigian. I also harvested another round of the climbing spinach that we sauteed and toped with a bit of feta cheese and some balsamic vinegar. That went really well with the eggplant.

Of course the okra is still doing it's thing (apparently it is immortal). The basil is starting to go to seed so I need to make some pesto, which works out because I just harvested 4 gallons of native pecans from a tree in my dad's yard. A few of those in with the basil, parmigiano, and olive oil should be delicious.

The chard in the new larger bed is about ready to harvest. The cabbage, collards, and kohlrabi are doing well. What I really wanted to talk about though is the fish. It's getting colder and I don't want to have to heat more than one tank. So... time to eat some fish. Aaron caught five of our larger talipia from one of the tanks, we filleted them, dredged the fillets in an egg wash and then in a corn meal/flour mix and popped them in some hot oil till golden brown. YUM!

When you fillet fish *DON'T THROW AWAY THE HEADS AND  BONES!!!!* If you toss out the heads and bones you are depriving yourself of some awesome possibilities. Remove the gills (just the read part on the inside) as well as the guts. Throw the rest of the head and carcass into a pot, cover with water, add some diced onion, salt, pepper, and garlic and simmer for about 20 minutes. Strain the fish stock into a fresh pot. Now you can discard the bones.

Great, now you have a pot of fish stock. big deal. What the heck do you do with fish stock? Funny, I asked myself the same question this morning. Mostly it is used for things like fish soups and chowders, but I found a fantastic and very simple recipe for a dish called "Fish Veloute" I just had to share.

In a large pot melt one stick of butter. slowly mix in one cup of flour a bit at a time to make a light roux. A roux is basically a starchy paste that is the basis of a whole host of sauces and pan gravies. Now slowly add in the fish stock a bit at a time and whisk until smooth. Slowly bring to a boil stirring occasionally to keep the starch from sticking to the bottom. *Slow* is the key here as you raise the temperature. You don't want to burn the starch at the bottom and you don't want the creamy soup to "break". "Breaking" is when a sauce separates and once that happens it is darned hard to rescue. Salt and pepper to taste (didn't need to salt mine at all as the fish stock was already pretty salty). That's it, you have a bowl of satisfying creamy goodness that you aren't likely to find outside of a high end
French restaurant, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to make, and best of all, the main ingredient is the stuff that most people would just toss down the disposal without knowing any better.

Enjoy!

Ok... enough with equipment. Time to show off some produce.

Keep in mind this is the end of October, not exactly the most productive time of year for gardeners. But nonetheless my little IBC tote system(s) are still quite productive. I keep waiting for everything to generally finish "doing their thing" so I can clean the bed out and restart with leafy greens, but everything just keeps going, and going, and going.....

Here's a wide shot of the first IBC tote system.

I am totally amazed that even now this late in the season how productive this little patch of plants are. The tall ones are Okra. I am getting around 5 or 6 nice sized okra *per day* from these plants. This comes out to about this much a week:

Here's a close up of one before I picked it this morning:

I also harvested some of my climbing New Zealand spinach and made a wonderful omelette with it. Here's a close up of what it looks like in the plant bed:

Also tucked in between the monster okra are some jalapino plants. What is interesting about these peppers is that the fruits were harvested in the late spring (made some great salsa with them!). I didn't bother to pull out the plants because the plan was to completely clean out the bed as soon as the okra stopped producing. Little did I know that I apparently have an immortal strain of okra. Anyway, these pepper plants are now producing their second batch of fruit!

While harvesting part of my breakfast this morning I had an awesome surprise! I have this huge eggplant that has continued to flower for the past several months but has never produced fruit. I was snipping the spinach and saw a large fruit out of the corner of my eye. I thought to myself "that's a *huge* jalapino, but when I looked closer, lo and behold, it's a softball sized eggplant that has been hiding in the middle of the thicket.

On the opposite side of the bed from the spinach is a monster basil plant. I've made a couple of nice batches of pesto from it and it is still quite happily producing. I plan to pick some more as soon as I finish writing this to make some pesto and cream cheese dip for a Halloween party this evening.

Ok, enough with the original bed, on to the new one. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I found that my fish tank can support quite a bit more growth than the tiny (but uber productive) original bed. So... I built a 4'x8' "lumber and liner" bed beside it, filled it with gravel, put in a nice bell siphon, ran a hose over to it, and planted some more stuff. Here's a picture of the addition:

And here are a few shots of the new "babies".

 Kohlrabi:

Chard:

Cabbage and Collards:

And here's the little poopers that make it all possible!

More on bell siphons...

I recently added a new 4'x8' media based bed to my setup and am running it off of the original tank I created from the IBC tote. Because it has a larger area for the water to trickle through I want to have a good ebb and flow cycle in order to keep dead spots from happening. With an ebb and flow system, not only do you suck air down into the media each time the water goes down, you also ensure that the entire bed gets a nice dose of fresh water with each cycle as well.

One of the inherent problems with bell siphons in larger beds is that due to the bigger surface area the water level tends to drop relatively slowly as the water siphons out. This means that when you hit the bottom of the cycle it is difficult to get the siphon to break so the bed can fill again. I did a bit of net surfin' and found a guy out there with an absolutely brilliant solution to this problem.

Basically he solved the problem by adding a small auxiliary tube to the bell siphon. NOTE: the top of this tube needs to be *below* the height of the internal stand pipe. The bottom end of this tube is cut just above the "teeth" of the bell at the point where you want the siphon to stop (your lowest water level). The tube is placed inside a small cup (A 2" PVC end cap works well). When the water level falls to the bottom of the tube it will also be below the edges of the cup. The water inside the cup quickly gets slurped up in the siphon, but the cup keeps additional water from pouring in. This leaves a nice protected air pocket that will easily break the siphon so the cycle can start over again.

Here's a link to a YouTube video that has some excellent illustrations showing how this works.

What to do about cold weather....

Although our weather is very mild around Austin, Texas, we do cool off in the winter. The severity can range from only a few light freezes throughout the winter to a few weeks of ice and below freezing temperatures. In either case, you can still grow some great veggies in an aquaponics system like the one describe if you take a few easy steps to protect the fish and plants.

Talapia don't like cold temperatures. So, unless you want to wake up one morning to a tank of fish-cicles you need to find a way to heat your water. The easiest I have found is to go to your local fish store and purchase a heater designed for tropical fish tanks. The largest size I have seen in the local pet mega-mart is a 300 watt unit designed for large fish tanks. While these probably won't do the trick if you live in Minnesota, around here they are enough to knock the cold off as long as you don't have multiple days of sub-freezing weather with no sun during the day.

For the plants, it's pretty darned easy to build a "hoop house" over the grow bed. Basically, this is just some PVC pipe bent into an arc and covered with clear plastic.

Here is a picture of the one I built last year: