… feeding the marauding hordes

I think we have reached bottom with the barramundi. They are now a small clutch of 10–15 and still displaying quite different, individual tendencies. They feed differently to the Jades, who just go nuts when we sprinkle in the floating pelletised food. The barras, however, prefer to strike their food as it sinks. A bit of a dilemma given that initially all we had to hand was the floating pellet style (think brown tiny balls about 1mm in circumference).

So I took to he kitchen and have produced some fish balls—a blended mash of white fish fillets, pellets and a small bunch of chard thrown in for good measure. It’s green and sticky but I have rolled it into balls which have been frozen, as we don’t need the whole batch all at once. The barras seem a little nonplussed about their new cuisine but that’s how they always are. I will post any changes and observations as they come to hand.

The grow beds are doing well and we have the final ‘rail’ in, which will be populated with various green veggies today. We have a small issue with filtering as there is a build up of sediment starting to move along the rails. Chris is working on installing one filter close to the source.

Some quick observations of the aquaponics system:

• 🙂 big thumbs up to tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, chard and celery in the grow beds
• 😦 big thumbs down to any of the Asian greens (Bok Choy, Pak Choy etc), any brassica (broccoli, kale etc), beans and capsicum in the grow beds
• lettuce just seems to thrive anywhere but is doing exceptionally well in the rails (NFT) system, as is currently, Pak Choy. Strawberries seem to be borderline, but we do hold hope for them to settle in and start producing. Maybe it is a season thing—I have not checked.

The soil garden is looking really good, with huge growth on the pumpkins, watermelon and green beans. The finger eggplants, capsicums, leeks are all still growing strongly and the new growth on the brassicas and snow peas is very heartening. As for pests, we seem to have very few—time for a small happy dance!

[There is so much I am learning from my studies in Sustainability and, in an effort not to cloud this space with too much stuff, I have opted to start a new blog. If you are interested (climate change, sustainability, coal seam gas, plastics, sustainable food, peak oil, limits to growth etc) you can find this at: http://cow2014.wordpress.com]