self sufficient life

Free Fish Food

Daphnia (a.k.a. water fleas) can be bought at most aquarium shops, but what if you could get them for free? These tiny crustaceans are really easy to breed. In the summer months you can simply put a bucket filled with old aquarium water in a sunny place and they will have enough food to thrive and you will have a constant supply of free fish food.

I filled a 250 liter rainwater barrel with aquarium water and put some fish food in there every few days until I had a nice algae bloom.

I went to the aquarium store quite a few times, but each time they where out of life daphnia, I used too see them there every time, but now that I needed them they didn’t have any… typical…

Eventually I managed to buy a small bag. I put them in the green water and after only two weeks the water was crystal clear and swarming with daphnia. Every day I can scoop some out to feed my fish but the supply seems endless.

During winter the barrel froze over and I thought that the water fleas had probably all died, but to my surprise they continued breeding when spring arrived.

If you want to have live fish food during the winter as well, you can set up a culture vessel inside, but you will probably have to feed them.

Square Foot Gardening

Our kids are never playing in the sandbox because of the bugs and spiders that get in there, so today we got the sand out to try something new. Since the contents of our compost bin wasn’t ready to use yet, we went into the forest to get some good compost. We filled the sandbox with it and used some rope to partition the square meter box into 9 square feet patches.

Each square has been planted with a different crop. We have planted: four heads of lettuce, one tomato plant, one cucumber plant, four cloves of garlic, some rosemary, thyme, a sunflower and two patches with some different flowers.

The size of one square meter is perfect for our 8 year old daughter to walk around and be able to reach every part of her garden. This system was taken from the book All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew and it supposedly lets you grow about twice as much in half the space compared to traditional gardening, while only requiring about 20% of the work.

Solarpower Breakthrough at IBM

You probably know how you can use a magnifying glass to concentrate solar power into a small spot and start a fire. The solar power researchers at IBM have taken it a step further and managed to concentrate incoming solar energy by a factor of 2300, equaling about 230 watts of power on a square centimeter. This energy could then be converted into about 70 watts of usable electric energy. The biggest problem with concentrating the suns rays this much is that it heats the solar cells to about 1600 degrees Celsius, which would melt them. IBM however is an expert at cooling high power computer chips and managed to keep the solar cells at a ‘cool’ 85 degrees Celsius!

Read IBM’s press release here

Fishy Tomatoes

After a bit more tweaking, the barrelponics system is up and running! I have put seven little goldfish in that I had rescued from our 800 liter goldfish tank before the big ones could eat them. The little ones overwintered in our tropical aquarium but where now getting big enough to eat the guppy fry, so they needed a new home anyway.

I have taken one of the tomato plants that I had planted in the garden a few weeks ago and moved it into the aquaponics barrel. Another one that is almost exactly the same size will stay in the soil. This should be a nice test to compare how the two plants develop and how much fruit they produce, let the waiting game begin!

Free food production in your backyard

Summer is really starting now! The last couple of days we’ve had 23 – 25C temperatures and the forecast for the next week is the same. While our friends from down-under are getting ready for winter, we can start growing all sorts of yummy things in the garden.

I thought I’ll use the long weekend to set up a little half barrel aquaponics system. I still had one of those blue barrels laying around, so I went ahead and cut it in half to create two grow beds. After filling the grow beds with washed gravel and filling them with water the troubles started: I was using a loop siphon to do the ebb and flow in the barrel, but the loop just didn’t work like it should. When filling the barrel, the siphon should kick in at a set level and empty the barrel again, giving the plant roots access to oxygen rich air. After the barrel has been emptied the siphon should break and the barrel should slowly fill up with water again.

My siphon either wouldn’t kick in correctly, leaving the barrel flooded, or it wouldn’t break, leaving the barrel empty at all times. Some more tweaking is necessary for my barrelponics to work. Since I don’t have to go to work today, I’ll have all day to try to get this working.

Aeroponics barrel

The weather was beautiful yesterday, so I decided to go outside and make a new hydroponics system. Well, actually its an aeroponics system, because the plants roots will not be growing in water, but they will be hanging down from the mesh pots and misted with a nutrient solution. This method of growing gives the roots better access to oxygen, which has a positive effect on the plant growth.

I didn’t want to go out and buy anything, so I went looking for usable items in the garage and basement. I found a rainwater barrel, that I wasn’t really using. I cut the barrel in half, because it was too big. One rainwater barrel lid has been glued to the bottom of the half that I cut of. Another lid is used to hold the plants.

I bought some microdrip system parts, by Gardena, a while ago. Their system uses flexible tubing and they have a whole range of different drippers and spray nozzles that are installed into the tubing simply by screwing them in. Since I had these parts laying around, I used them for my aeroponics barrel. You can see the black Gardena tubing in the picture.

I made 8, evenly spaced, holes in the top lid to hold the mesh pots for the plants. The tubing is glued to the inside of the lid with some hot glue. A spray nozzle is installed in the tubing right beside each mesh pot, so each plant will have access to the nutrients.
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Here’s a close-up of one of the mesh pots and a spray nozzle. (You can click on the pictures for a bigger view)

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With all of the mesh pots installed the top of the lid looks nice and clean. The hole in the middle is used for the pump to suck the water out of the barrel. I’m using an external aquarium filter pump, but if you would use a submersible pump the whole thing would look even cleaner, with only one power cord coming out of the barrel, instead of two pieces of garden hose. Like I said: I’m only using parts that I had laying around and the external aquarium pump was what I had to work with and it does the job!

With everything hooked up the spray nozzles started spraying a fine mist of water drops onto the mesh pots. Looks like my aeroponics system is working nicely! I’ve planted some seeds in a germination tray. When they get big enough I will put them into the aeroponics system and then we’ll see if it really works as good as others say!

The lettuce raft

I build a small raft system a while ago and plumbed it into my bedroom aquarium. It didn’t turn out to work too good however. Tomato and lettuce seeds started sprouting after only a few days and seemed to grow quite nicely, but as they got bigger the growing stopped and the plants where looking terrible! I finally found out what’s wrong with my plants: the T5 compact fluorescent lamp I had installed for the plants was not delivering the light that the plants need. The spectrum of my lamp is about as bad as it gets for plants, so I need to find some better lights to start growing lettuce inside.

Since the weather conditions are starting to get better for outside growing, I’m going to build a new system for outside use and upgrade the lighting on my small raft system when the weather gets colder again.