January 24, 2011
If you’re serious about growing your own food, you need to look at Growing Power in Milwaukee. Here are the headlines:
Show me a non-aquaponic system that can produce that! Take 5 minutes of your life and look at a non-profit doing something amazing:
January 15, 2011
In spite of the snow and big freeze before Christmas (it got down below -10c) we have been able to keep harvesting food from the aquaponics and under the fleece tunnels. The pic on the left is perennial spinach, and the one below is the first of our aquaponic leeks heading for the dinner table.
And here’s some of our Ruby Pak Choi:
December 29, 2010
It’s been a great 2010 at the Trafford Eco-House, we’ve not posted updates recently not due to lack of activity, but the opposite!
The garden’s been going well and we’ve got trout and beds of winter veg surviving the snow. The pace isn’t going to stop in 2011 though, this is the year when the changes to the house should happen: Solar PV, Solar Thermal, Woodburner with Flue Boiler, extension with bike garage, wrap the whole thing in external insulation, put up much thicker curtains.
The garden in 2011 will keep us busy too – we’ll fix up the shed and give it a green roof, expand the aquaponics, and dig over another 500sqft of turf into veg patch.
Looks like a fantastic year ahead, and we’re really looking forward to what we’ll be saying this time next year.
Hope you’ve all had a good 2010, and are looking forward to an even better 2011.
August 11, 2010
We’ve just got back from a week away, and in our absence the trout were being fed by an automatic fish-feeder. They seem to be pretty happy with that arrangement as they now look huge – at least in comparison to when we left!
We weighed them to see and their weight is now over 35g – doubled in the last two weeks. Time to up the amount we feed them again.
July 26, 2010
Yesterday we lost our first fish – she got caught up in the net that is over the top of the tank to stop then jumping out!
Feeling a bit sad that we’ve lost one already, but it did give us a chance to weigh and measure one accurately. We’d been working on a weight of about 10g and thought they were about 4″ long. The one who came out is 18g and 4.5″! So now we understand why they were a bit hungrier than expected – we’ve upped their feed from 30g/day to 45g/day (about 1% of body weight). Here’s the pic of the little one who sacrificed herself so that the rest could get properly fed:
July 20, 2010
They’re a little shy, so no photos yet, but we do have 100 little trout swimming around.
I’ll try and get some pictures when they’ve settled in!
July 19, 2010
Rainbow trout to be exact! We should be getting tiny (10g) Rainbow trout for our system tomorrow, so I thought it was time for a quick celebratory update:
April 13, 2010
Almond - Robijn - Blossom
Just time for another quick update before I zoom off to Green Drinks tonight to present on the topic of Manchester’s Food Security and Aquaponics. I had a good half-hour of planting this morning so, I had a chance to run around with the camera capturing all the growth:
April 9, 2010
I’m so flat out planting and working that it’s hard to get to the blog, but I’m taking plenty of pics along the way, so here’s a quick photo update for you:
January 18, 2010
I know that is an optimistic title for a post, but it feels like we are getting there. Hopefully the leaking sump joints are sealed, and we can get on with it! Here are the latest pics:
You can see my beautiful brick path – good thermal mass to help with moderating the polytunnel temperatures, and much nicer to walk on than the mud! The large buried sump at the back has a timber deck covering it that the kids can stand on to reach the back beds – so I think those will now be their spot for planting.
And here’s the right hand side:
The timber “paving” is over the new link between the two shallow sumps – designed so that I can lift it up to check for leaks.
Now it’s all “cycling” again – building up the bacteria that’ll clean the water. Soon I’ll start planting – but in the meantime we have our first Aquaponics workshop on next week, so time to tidy up!
