Day 1

First day of 2010,  first day of the decade.  First harvest of the year and first harvest for Picking from "the patch".

Below you can see we have picked spring onion, snow peas,  small tomato, coriander, vietnamese mint, celery, chilli, baby leeks and a cucumber.  All of this except for the cucumber was made into a beautiful asian dish with rice and pork.

Earlier in the day we picked a strawberry or two which Grace (our oldest daughter) swiftly devoured.  This was however gone before i had thought about starting this journal so unfortunately I have no evidence.  I will however in the next few days have some more delicious strawberries to take a pic of if I can beat Grace to them.

The cucumber we picked today will join the one we picked yesterday and we will make our first preserved product.  Bread and butter pickled cucumbers.

What is this all about?

So what is aquaponics?  Aquaponics is basically a system of growing produce using fish waste as the fertiliser for the plants and in turn the plants and their growing medium filters and cleans the water for the fish.

A fish tank containing fish has its water pumped periodically through a grow bed where the plants are planted.  Its an amazing system and organic as well.  The growth of the plants is amazing and you can plant more per square meter than in a traditional garden as the nutrients are constantly being replaced by the fish waste.

So why this blog?  We are going to post a record of what we harvest and how much over a year.  We hope this will also help people understand more about aquaponics and just what sort of things you can grow in the system.

Currently we have a 1000 lt fish tank and 2 x 650 lt grow beds.  In the fish tanks is around 50 Murray Cod.  We had trout over the winter months and they grew to an a good "plate" size in about 6 months.  The Cod will take a lot longer though to grow to a decent size.

In the next few weeks we will be doubling the size of the system to incorporate a 3000 lt tank and 2 more grow beds.  This should hopefully mean we can supply our family of four all the veggies we need.  Our oldest daughter at 3years old loves watching the many things grow.  Every day she asks "Is their a strawberry for me?"  "Can I pick a cucumber?"

So join us on this journey as we bring to you a year in "the patch".