Judies grandfather, Trevor Morgan, sadly passed away recently so I wanted to post this tribute to him with some photos of his wonderful and brilliantly constructed home hydroponics system.
I was really grateful to have had the chance to meet Trevor several times and really hit it off with a kindred creative spirit. Trev, you will be dearly missed.
If anyone is interest in purchasing this system please contact me and I will pass your offers on to Trevor’s widow.
Yeppoon State High School has been branching into the field of aquaponics and is teaching students about this budding area of agriculture with an interesting program in the school that integrates hydroponics into their existing aquaculture system.
The entire system is housed under cover with artificial lighting so that all the elements can be controlled for the students to experiment with. YSHS staff Charlie and Tamara have been working on building a number of different hydroponic systems that students can use to learn about the pros and cons of different Hydroponic and Aquaponic growing techniques and the results that the kids have come up with have been outstanding.
The plant production is tied back into the aquaculture system with Barramundi and red claw generating the nutrients the run the system.
I bought my Aseako electric bike a few months ago and absolutely love it. It is very solidly constructed and wasn’t particularly difficult to assemble and get ready to ride. The European model E-bikes were really tempting but started out at more then twice the price of the Aseako which was out of my price range.
The green tyres were not the standard ones that come with the bike. Two weeks after getting it I blew the rear tyre which really annoyed me as it had only been used for a short time and it had only been ridden on sealed roads. Changing the rear wheel on a heavy E-bike on the side of the road is difficult and unappealing and was a bit of an issue if I planned to use this as my second vehicle and main form of transport. I ordered some Tannus tubeless tyres and got them fitted at Giant Cycles in Rockhampton and am really happy with them. The tyres are a very tough polymer that are solid filled and are perfectly satisfactory for urban street use. If feels great to know I can go on a long ride and not have to worry about getting home after a blowout.
The bike is powered by a 200 watt motor connected to the peddle crank and the battery gives the bike enough power for around 20 km with a 90kg rider. The battery itself is quite light and can be unlocked and removed from the back frame for charging. The torque does tend to fall away as the battery gets closer to empty so I usually put it onto the charger at the end of each day.
The E-Bike laws have changed since I got this bike so they don’t sell a version with a manual throttle anymore. The Law now allows 250 watt motors to be used but not with throttle controls. Instead bikes must be fitted with a pedelec controller which applies the power in proportion the the speed that you peddle. I always turn the pedelec controller off when riding my bike as I consider it to be dangerous. I have found that you can often forget that you have it switched on and find that when starting from a stationary position it can kick in and give you unexpected forward momentum. I can just imaging getting thrown under a bus with this type of miscalculation so I stick to the throttle.
The council has been putting in a fantastic bike path that runs along the old railway line starting near the old railway station in Yeppoon and going past my place and up past the golf course. When it is finished it is going to make it really easy to commute into Yeppoon by bike.
The Bok Choi plants have grown so much faster then the other greens and are getting to the point where they are ready to harvest. This is were I usually lose everything to cabbage moths but this time I have started spraying with DIPEL at the first sign on infestation.
I went out to check the plants this afternoon and there was a cloud of moths flapping around the greens but there was still only one plant showing signs of damage. This was the one I first found that told me it was time to bring out the spray.
You can see the web that forms in the heart of the plant which is the first sign you get that a massive infestation is about to break out. I will put some spray on the next few days to try and fend off the plague.
I have started up the incubator again and am going to begin hatching out chickens on a much larger scale then before. I am not allowed to have a rooster in my zoning but am lucky enough to have a friend who will sell the fertilized eggs to me for the same price as unfertilized ones. It took a fair bit of tweaking to get the incubator to the exact temperature but now that it is set correctly it seems fairly stable.
The incubator didn’t cost much but is a US model so I have plugged it into a 120 volt inverter which is running of a computer power supply. If you are using a PC’s power supply you just have to remember that the red wires are 5 volts, the Yellow wires are 12 volts and the green wire needs to be crossed with the black wire to turn it on.
I picked up a Swiss Brown mushroom kit as I want to work out how to culture my own mushrooms. There is some information on the Milkwood Permaculture site about doing this from scratch but you first need to get hold of fresh mushroom spawn so a mushroom kit seemed to be a good way to get started.
I am so happy to be able to announce that Judie and I were engaged on the 12th of July and are planning to have a December wedding. Judie has been such an inspiration to me and I am looking forward to spending my life with my beautiful, caring and kind hearted sweetheart!
