Never ending winter!

All hopes of putting more plants in the garden this past weekend were dashed upon arriving home to find snow on the ground. Winter refuses to give up this year! Instead of putting plants in the ground, I put bunches of horse manure courtesy of my friends Tom and Kelly.

I stopped by their house on Saturday and filled three 5 gal buckets with high quality Montezuma County hay fed horse manure.



I turned the unplanted portions of my garden and worked in about 10 gallons of the manure and then let the soaker hose run for a while to work it into the soil.

It actually works out well that I can't plant right away because the extra time allows the bacteria in the soil to begin the nitrogen cycle on the manure converting the Ammonia in the poop, to Nitrites and then into Nitrates which plants can then use as food (sound similar? the same process occurs in my AP system).

The seeds I started in my garden are growing nicely. My snap peas are growing rapidly and hopefully within the next couple of weeks I will be able to direct them to begin climbing the chain link fence they are growing along. I am planting climbing veggies along the fence in hopes that by late summer I will have a living fence!




The garlic also continues to grow in leaps and bounds!



The lettuce and arugula are also sprouting up nicely.

Since I was unable to put my tomato and cucumber seedlings in the ground, I decided that I needed a new place to store them. I had been keeping them on my desk because it receives a bit of sun during the day. As we get further into the year the sun has been creeping higher in the sky decreasing the light on my desk each day. To free up some space and get more light on my little green creatures I built a hanging shelf on my western "porthole window" from miscellaneous materials from around my house. Now my plants can get late afternoon sun and be out of my way. I think its pretty ingenious!


I had a near disaster this weekend when I left my cucumbers outside in their trays to get some light during a period of the lovely wind we have been having. I returned home to find the trays over turned and the seedlings in a pile on the ground... I quickly put them into peat pots, watered and gave them a dose of liquid sea weed in hopes to revive them. A couple plants appear to have broken stems, but as of the next day all of them had regained some rigidity and were looking healthier. I hope that they are not all dead when I return from Fruita on Thursday.

Check back in a week for the next blog which will hopefully be about sprout growing and cold frames!

Wigglin' Friends

Having dove head first into the art of agriculture I have acquired a great appreciation for worms. So, for another project I decided to start a worm composter. After extensive research online at the web site Red Worm Composting I set to constructing my own indoor worm farm.

To do this I bought a 13 gal Rubbermade container and a spigot. I attached the spigot to one end to act as a drain for any nutrient rich moisture that accumulates. I then drilled small holes in both the sides of the container and the top to ensure adequate airflow through the bin.



To begin making a suitable environment for the worms, I shredded card board, and brown paper. Shredding the paper as opposed to just layering it allows for better airflow throughout the bed allowing the worms to do their job more effectively.



In the bottom of the bin I put wet, but not dripping, paper to form a bed for the worms. On top of that I began to accumulate left over fruit and veggies, and on top of that goes dry or moist paper.


With all this together I let it sit for about a week while I was waiting for my worms. Letting the compost sit for a bit before you add worms is beneficial to let bacteria grow and begin to break down the organic matter which makes eating easier for the worms. Not only do the worms eat the veggies, but they will also eat the paper products.

After searching around Cortez for Red Wiggler worms (the best kind supposedly for composting) to no avail I found LOTS of places online that sell worms! I finally chose Uncle Jim's Worm Farm because they had free shipping. Now the worms aren't local (bummer) in fact they come from the Susquehanna Valley in PA. Apparently good composting worms don't grow in the dry desert, who would have thought! After 5 days, I got a package marked "Live Worms". They are shipped in a breathable bag with dry mulch in it to suck out moisture and prevent freezing. Opened the bag to 2000 wigglin' friends!



And into the bin they go to eat and drink after their long journey!



As we speak, the worms are hopefully eating all of the goodies in the bin and producing worm castings, black gold. I can then take these castings and put into my garden as super rich fertilizer to grow more plants whose waste will go into the worm bin and the worms will make more black gold to make more plants...etc. Pretty good recycling, ehh? Not only do you get use all of your waste organic matter but also your waste cardboard which saves a trip to the recycling center and the eliminates the need for the energy consuming recycling process.

OK, now a few cool facts about the worms. Each worm will live for about a year and each day will produce its weight in worm castings. Each worm can reproduce in 90 days which means that every 3 months, excluding worm death, your worm population will double. This is great because these worms also are great garden worms and go well in my AP system eating up solids which are trapped in the growing medium.

Since I live in the Tiny Mansion, every thing has to be tiny. But someday I will hopefully create a much larger worm bin to be able to handle many thousands of more worms and much more compost.

It's cheep, easy, low maintenance and pays for itself quickly (go look how much black gold costs at a nursery!). It also fits nicely under the bathroom sink!

Banana Peel

Well it’s been a while since my last post mainly because not much exciting has happened in the Tiny Mansion Aquaponically speaking.

I did a couple of hard ware changes which has improved the timing of my pump. The first upgrade is a digital timer for my on/off pump sequence. I had been using a $4 analog timer which has 15 min increments which are closer to 18-24 min increments. Not ideal… Online if found a 20 on/off per day digital timer which is proving to work out great, and it was less than 20 bucks. The other change I did was shorten the stand pipe which drains my grow bed to a height which prohibits the water to ever completely inundate the gravel. This is something I should have done from the get go, but in my eagerness I completely looked over it.

My fish are doing very well. Only 1 death in the past 3 weeks, and I even nursed a sick fish back to health by isolating it and giving the water a good dose of salt. The rest of the fish are enthusiastically eating and noticeably growing in size. One of the two survivors from the original batch of fish has about doubled in size and is probably 3 inches long.



The plants are not making such leaps and bounds. Things are alive, but are not growing well at all. I think this is due to too little nutrients for too many plants. I have been thinning some of the sprouts, but I think I will have to become more drastic with this, and I will also hopefully be able to get a few more fish soon. I have been having some graying of my arugula and I don’t exactly know what is causing this. My newest hypothesis is potassium deficiency. So to help counter this, I buried a banana peal below my input pipes. A lot of folks who have AP systems do this, so hopefully this helps.

Ok, onto the dirt garden. I installed 50’ of soaker hose through the garden that seems to be doing a good job of getting water to most of the garden. The garlic continues to grow well and I am starting to see lettuce, peas and arugula come up. In the west end of the garden there are a lot of seedlings that I didn’t plant and I think they are volunteer tomatoes from ground fall ‘maters from last year. They are growing in my melon and dill bed, and I am going to make sure they are not either of those before I pull them.

My seedlings are also thriving and about ready to put outside. Hopefully next weekend the weather forecast will show that we are past the below freezing nights so I can put my tomatoes and cucumbers in the dirt.

Next weekend I am also going to get home horse manure for an added nutrient boost! I'll make sure to get photos of collecting manure!

Google Sketchup

I recently found out about this great new (?) program called Google Sketchup. Pretty much it is a 3D modeling program which is fairly comprehensive and easy to use with great online tutorial videos. I decided to attempt to make a scale 3D model of my AP system as practice for when I am designing a new and large system in the future. Anyway, the final product is below.




In Fruita until Thursday night. Hope the system is functioning well. Will post an update probably on Monday, once I get off a weekend San Juan trip!

Dirt Farmin'

Quick update on the traditional garden here at Tiny Mansion.

I got home from Fruita on Thursday to find that my pickling cucumbers had sprouted and are looking very healthy measuring up to 1 1/2" tall! The strawberry trays worked excellent!



This year I decided to grow garlic after indulging myself with all of my friends homegrown garlic last year. If you have never had homegrown garlic... you should. It's simply amazing! Garlic is planted in the fall (just before Halloween) and it sits in the ground through the winter. The other day I peaked outside to see that they had sprouted. The weight of all of the snow this year compacted the soil so much that some of the cloves were sprouting and the clove itself was sticking out of the ground. So I buried them a bit more and over the past couple days the sprouts have doubled in size. When I got home yesterday amidst a April 1st snow storm (winter won't end around here) this is what I found.



The snow has melted today, and they still look happy!

I went to Let It Grow again today to get some more seeds to start indoors and to round out my seed selection for my garden this year. I bought some Cherry Tomato seeds, Snap peas, Scarlet Runner beans, and Sunberries (which are supposed to be a bit like a blueberry). I started the Cherry Tom's, Sunberries and Nyagous Tom's today in more homemade "trays" made from a juice jug and yogurt container.



Even though it just snowed, the worst of the winter is over (I hope) and the ground is soft enough to work. So today I put in the ground the plants that can withstand a bit of cold. That includes: Lettuce, Snap Peas, Dragon Carrots, Dill and Golden Midget Watermelons. I measured my garden today and it is about 75 square feet, which is pretty large (I think) and a lot bigger than it looks so it's looking like I will have a bunch of veggies this year!



For the outdoor garden this year I will be attempting to grow: Tomatoes (three varieties), Scarlet Runner Beans, Snap Peas, Lettuce, Arugula, Basil, Cilantro, Dragon Carrots, Garlic, Sunberries, Golden Midget Watermelon, Dill, Cayenne Peppers, Bell Peppers (?), Pickling Cucumbers, Bushy Cucumbers and hopefully not too many weeds!

Still Kickin'

Well, after 5 days away for work, I have returned to find that the AP system is still running and that both fish are still alive and kicking. The plants also have grown with new seedlings having sprouted as well! What a relief! The Arugula continues to thrive with my whole second row having sprouted and growing well. The first row actually starting to look like arugula. The lettuce continues to grow as well, though slower.



The tomatoes have also made progress, the new growth from last week is beginning to look healthy. They were looking a bit yellow as they were coming up, but they are beginning to get a good green color.


We got back from work significantly early today due to weather leaving me enough time to run to Durango for additional goldfish. More fish= more food for the plants which means (hopefully) quicker plant growth and higher yield. If you will remember, my Nitrate levels were at zero last week meaning that ALL of the possible plant food was being consumed which indicates that they can and want to consume more. I purchased 15 of the finest 25 cent feeder gold fish that the city of Durango had to offer and quickly zoomed home to get them in the tank. I also purchased a small fish bowl to act as a holding tank for additional gold fish while I figure out how many my system can hold, and to act as a holding facility if I need to do any work in my fish tank. It also spruces up the Tiny Mansion!



I did a fish tank overhaul today when I returned from my venture to the "big city". After I had intentionally set up my fish tank, complete with gravel on the bottom, I read that in most AP systems gravel is not used. This is because it catches solid wastes which once built up to a certain level, can actually become harmful to the fish and thus you need to clean it. Instead of cleaning it every month, I decided to take it out completely and replace it with some extra PVC I had lying around, giving the fish ample things to hide in, under and around.


When I removed all of the gravel, it stirred up a whole lot of debris and clouded the water pretty good. Before putting fish back into the tank I strained out the big chunks, and let the pump run two full cycles to clean up the water a bit. It quickly cleared.

Before putting the new fish into the tank, I put them all in my new fish bowl (see above) and slowly acclimated them to the fish tank water by adding cups of water from the tank every hour or so. I also salted the fish tank to 3 ppt in an attempt to kick any nasty diseases that the fish from the store may be carrying. This also boosts their immune system. Hopefully this batch of fish will fare better than the last. If these fish die off, I will begin to investigate further whether or not the gravel in my grow bed is leaching bad things into the water. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Once I did the gravel removal, I tested the water and everything looks good. The Ammonia levels were up a bit, but this is likely due to the amount of unprocessed excrement that I stirred up while removing the gravel. The PH has slowly been going down, and is now a solid 7.8 which is a good level.

Before leaving for the week, I decided to make a poor mans reflector for my grow lights in hopes of enhancing the amount of light that actually reaches the plants. I did this my draping strips of aluminum foil over the tops of the lights. By doing this I have reflected the light that was escaping out of the sides back into the grow bed. It makes a visible difference, I hope my plants appreciate it. I will be working on a more permanent reflector here soon.



All is well here, hopefully the fish will remain healthy and begin producing mass amounts of food for my food!