Bathtub Alley

I have had a couple of weeks holiday and it has given me the chance to get through a lot of jobs that have been piling up.

The yard has been broken up into 7 zones with different purposes and I am trying to work my way through one zone at a time as working on the whole lot was beginning to overwhelm me. I want each zone to act like a room and have some degree of screening or separation from the others.

There are 12 bathtubs going into this zone which are plumbed up to allow the water to recirculate from a 7000 liter fish tank around and back to a collection sump made from 2 large cast iron tubs.

The growing tubs are supported on rock block pillars that are filled with cement and reinforced internally with scrap steel bars. Under each pillar I cast a large cement block to create a stable platform.

I was really worried that the tubs wouldn't be able to hold the weight of the gravel when supported just on the their ends so I tested one of them for a couple of weeks and it held up well. The tubs have been in for 8 months now and there has not been any obvious signs of stress.

Supporting the tubs from the sides would be a preferable means of support but doing it this way allows them to be placed along the fence line with very little space wasted. I wouldn't do this with fiberglass tubs and haven't tried it with cast iron tubs so I don't know how they would go.

I am now adding a timber facade to the tubs to make them look more attractive and give me some extra storage places for pots and PVC pipes. They will eventually be painted the same cream colour as the house and shed.

This wooden framing is blatant plagiarism of the excellent work that Bill M did on his Aquaponics System. Bill was kind enough to give me some pointers when I started. There are access hatches with removable panels to allow maintenance of the internal plumbing.

The paneling is just made of garden edging timber from Mitre 10 and works out at about $1 a meter. It works well for this purpose but shouldn't be bought until you are ready to use it as it has a tendency to warp very quickly if it isn't stacked properly and kept dry.

Once it has been screwed into place there isn't a problem and any shrinkage is uniform and looks quite good.

There is one pump in the sump tank that turns on for 15 minutes every hour. It is a large 100 watt pond pump so it is only drawing 25 watts an hour which puts little strain on the houses solar panels.

The tank currently has 100 Jade and Silver perch in it including a few very large ones (about 5 years old) that were given to me by Graham F. These fish were originally part of Central Queensland Universities Aquaculture program and were given to Graham when they finished with them. Graham has had them for the last couple of years and gave them to me when he moved. I wont be eating these big fish and will keep them as pets. I also have a theory that the reason people have difficulty breeding perch in tanks is that their stock are so young.

I have been told that perch do breed in dams and have read somewhere that they may react to a change in temperature, rise in water level and the scent that comes from dried grass washing into the water ways that trigger their breeding activity. I have no idea if any of that is true so if you have some hard facts please make at a comment to this post and let us all know!

There are also 50 fingerlings that Geoff and Llyn S gave me yesterday when they moved into town. They don't live to far from me so it was a good way for Llyn to put the fish somewhere where she can watch them grow up.

I originally covered the surface of the tank in duckweed when there wasn't any fish in there but have covered it up with tarps to stop the algae from growing. Eventually I will find a more attractive cover for the tank.








When the weather starts to warm up I will be adding redclaw to the tank. They shouldn't have any problems cohabitation with the perch and I will make sure that they have lots of structure for them to hide in. Jade and Silver perch generally won't bother crayfish and are more interested in the vegetation and pellets that are added to the tanks.

I am trying to make the yard as easily maintainable as possible and have been putting in cement edging that I can wippersnip up to. I am also building some boxes that will go around the fruit trees in the orchard/permaculture zone  and have been getting my sisters children to paint them.

The boxes will be back filled with soil and manure and beneficial insect attracting flowers will be planted into them. A future project is to build a top bar beehive so getting the flowers established now will help the hive out later on.









Greg Rutter

June Meeting

Denis sent me a copy of these photos from the June L2L meeting at Bill and Colleen’s place.

Situated on a very well maintained 3 acres in Barmaryee, Bill and Colleen have been working on their own little patch of paradise for the last few years.



Bill has been experimenting with wicking beds over the past year and has a number of very large and highly productive systems in place.

In addition to the wicking beds there is an aquaponic system installed with several Jade perch and a grove of different fruit trees.

Bill makes use of free mulch from the council and says that it has gone a long way to improving the quality of the garden.

Another main attraction is the beautiful wood fired oven that Bill built and which gave us a wonderful pizza lunch on the day.


I also liked the flock of different chicken varieties with their iridescent plumage, there was a mix of game birds and more common domestic birds.




Greg Rutter

LawnToLunch.com

When we first started Lawn to Lunch a couple of years ago Gwen and I tried to get the domain name LawnToLunch.com but unfortunately were not able to as it had already been taken by someone else who wasn’t making use of it at the time.

A month ago I started receiving emails from a number of different people saying that the domain name was becoming available and enquiring as to whether I wanted to buy it. I ignored all the emails as they were asking too much for it.

I stopped receiving these emails a few days ago so I checked the availability status of the domain and found that the previous owners had let it laps so I registered it for the group. I still need to redirect it to the new Blogger account but once done visitors will be able to find the link through the .ORG and .COM domains.

I am really glad that we got this name as I always have to stress to people that it is .org when they ask the address and then hope they remember as most people find it unusual.

Greg R

Bulk fish food

 Fish food can be one of the more expensive components of operating a large aquaponics setup and ways of cutting the cost of food and producing your own food generates a lot of discussion on the Aquaponics forums.  When I first put in a tank I ordered a 20kg sack of food from a Brisbane retailer which cost about $60. The problem with doing this was that it became clear that the cost of freight added to this was going to make food purchasing an expensive option.

The third time that I rang up to make an order curiosity got the better of me and I asked what the bulks sizes of food delivery cost. The sales man told me that they could provide pellets in half ton or full ton pallet deliveries. I got all of the details and said said I would call back later after I thought about it.

I went looking for information on the net about how long feed pellets last and rang a friend who runs a commercial Barra farm to pick her brains. She she told me that she had once bought a ton of feed and put it in a feed bin in her shed but that it only lasted about 8 months.

The comments on the net were similar which was a problem as I needed the food to last about 3 years to make it worth while.

Some more research led me on to the idea of vacuum sealing food in Mylar.

This is a method of long term storage that can be done at home without any special equipment, you just add the food you want to store, throw in a couple of oxygen absorbers and then use a house hold vacuum cleaner to suck all of the air out of the bag before sealing it with a clothes iron.

Finding the bags wasn't as easy as I thought it would be but, although being a very common method of storage in the United States the bags didn't seem to be as readily available in Australia.

I ended up ordering some through Ebay and had them shipped here at a cost of around $3 per 20kg sack.

Packing was a simple process, I made sure that I put a pump filter sock over the end of the vacuum cleaner so that it didn't suck any of the pellets out and then started transferring the feed from the original bags to the mylar.

There were a couple of tricks that I quickly discovered. The first is that the seal on the bottom of the bags is only about a cm away from the bottom edge which means that if you move these large bags too roughly then the seal can break and the bag will depressurise. This was easily fixed by running the clothes iron along the bottom before adding feed to give the bag a good 10 cm of seal which seemed to hold well. Care was still needed when relocating the sacks but it seemed to work well.

Another thing I found was that the top of the sacks have an envelope type fold and after being ironed shut didn't hold a perfect seal. This is can be avoided however by pressing the edges of the bag true against each other rather then using the folded seals, this method has held a good vacuum seal for the last 18 months.

After the feed is added to the bag open a pack of O2 absorbers that come with the mylar bags and throw a couple onto the top of the feed. Seal most of the top of the bag with a clothes iron but leave space to put the nozzle of your vacuum cleaner into the bag. Once all the air has been removed, quickly remove the nozzle and seal the last part of the bag. It should now be rock hard and can be date stamped with a marker pen and moved to a storage location.

If any of the bags lose their hardness within a few days you can reseal them but I just use those ones up first and leave the best sealed ones to last. Storing the bags inside PVC buckets is a good idea if you have a rodent problem in your storage area. I often pick up second hand buckets from the Farmers coop for a few dollars each, they normally have had a food stuff like yogurt in them previously and are easy to clean. Bucket storage makes them easy to move around as well.

I have had the bags stored for 18 months now and the quality of feed has been excellent in each bag that I have opened and I have so far only opened the worst sealed ones with the best seals being left to last.

The total cost of feed, delivery and mylar storage adds up to about $50 per sack which is more then $30 dollars a sack cheaper then it would have cost me to buy the feed one sack at a time.

Greg Rutter

Vote!

When we first setup the old L2L site, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to add a poll to find out what was driving people to take a greater interest in self sufficiency and food gardening.

When I talk to people everyone seems to have a different reason for catching the grow it yourself bug whether it be to cut down on the grocery bills or bring their street closer together with a community garden on their verge etc.

The problem was that there are so many good reasons to get involve and they all make sense! Well I made one big mistake with the old poll which was to add a final option at the end for "All of the above" and surprise, surprise everyone ticked that leaving us all non the wiser as to what really is driving this new urban food movement.

So now we have given the L2L digital stomping ground a face lift and moved it to Blogger to make it easier to adopt a readable magazine format I thought we might have another go.

At the bottom of the page I have added the poll again with no "all of the above" item. You can select multiple items but if you just pick the ones that are closest to your heart we might start to get a true picture of the issues that people are most interested in!

Greg Rutter