Greenhouse has arrived!

Talk about service. Got the greenhouse delivered yesterday (Friday) after only placing the order on Wednesday! Now to plot out the footing holes and start digging...

Greenhouse has been ordered

The greenhouse order has finally been placed. Clayton and Fiona over at SproutWell Greenhouses (www.sproutwellgreenhouses.com.au) have been most helpful in accommodating my needs. As some of you may know, I require a fairly large greenhouse to fit my kit in. The greenhouse I have ordered is The Prestige 3 meters wide by 9 meters long, which is not a common size for most suburban yards! Needless to say the bigger the better when it comes to having more grow room for organic produce, so we are putting in the biggest greenhouse we can fit. Pictured below is the 3M x 6M (which is essentially 2 X 3M kits joined). We are very excited!

 

Why Organic?

I wanted to quickly touch on the point of being organic.

“Organic” seems to be all the rage at the moment, but so it should be! As we become more and more aware of how our food is produced and what goes into our drinking water, etc. we all have the same notion to try to move away from this type of system, and back to something natural, fresh and...well....organic. It's not always that simple, nor cost effective to do so however. My wife and I made a commitment when we ventured down the aquaponics path that even though setting up a large scale (3000 litres +) aquaponics system would be costly, the health benefits for ourselves, our family, our future children and friends far outweighs the cost.

But being organic is not so simple, if you stay true to the term. Fish feed, fertilizer, water salts, water testing, even the water (fluoride in tap water is NOT organic!) used need to be organic, or free from contaminants of any shape or form. This is a huge challenge in itself. As an example we need to use rain water to fill the tanks, not tap water.

Originally we had ambitions of registering the domain name organicaquaponics.com.au, and selling my excess produce to make a dollar out of it. I had an epiphany at this stage that rather than selling the excess produce, why not just give it away, in an attempt to help others understand how this all works, and how they can benefit from home grown, organic produce.

A great idea is the welcoming of gold coin donations as this will help replenish seedlings at the start of each season, and also restock fish supplies and feed should we decide to eat them and give them away (undecided at this stage). My thoughts were to have a money jar in the greenhouse on a pedestal. If this was taken on by many people, we will then launch a fund raiser jar to help pay for a solar system to power the aquaponics greenhouse, so that it is completely carbon neutral. I also hope to encourage trading of produce with neighbours for things I do not grow at home.

Combining an organic method of food production and aquaponics makes for a very healthy, sustainable food production system that’s both environmentally friendly, and extraordinarily good for one’s self. If you are thinking about getting into aquaponics, go organic. It's going to be a little harder and more challenging, but I am sure the results will speak for themselves.

In the beginning….

Welcome to our first post! This will be one of our longer posts as we need to get everyone up to speed and introduce ourselves. My wife and I are working professionals that maintain a typical lifestyle in the outer northern suburbs of Melbourne (Australia). We don’t live lavishly, but do enjoy the odd perk in life. We have two beautiful dogs (Harley and Bella) that will frequent in the photos to come.

We have been renovating our house for the past few years, and we are now starting to focus some attention on the backyard. We bought this house with the intention of providing a large space for our dogs, a play space for our future children, and growing our own produce. We have a larger suburban block of land being just shy of ¼ acre, and our house being double story has a small footprint. This leaves a fairly large yard for tinkering with! We live on a very sloped block of land which makes landscaping difficult, but makes aquaponics easy…

Here is a couple of photos of the backyard after we had just bought the place, and put new fences in. Unfortunately this was taken from the bottom of the yard facing back towards the house so one cannot really gather what the yard looks like from this photo, but it’s all I have at this stage:

Pre-Retaining wall photo:

My passion for aquaponics started a few years back when I discovered this fantastic method of food production on the internet via various forums. Since then I kept my eye out for bits and pieces to build a system from, and slowly started collecting…

Fast forward to today and we are almost ready to put it all together and start farming! We figured this was an ideal time to start the blog so that others can also learning a thing or two from our rights and wrongs. We recently remodelled the backyard with some earthworks, a large retaining wall, and some trees (Lilly Pilli’s) across the back to kick off the landscaping of the yard. The large retained platform has been made especially for the aquaponics system with a greenhouse and other earth bound produce like carrots, potatoes, etc. Here are some pics:

Retaining wall drainage and plastic layed down:

Another view:

 Shed site being cut:

Birds eye view: 

So there you have it! That is where we are up to at this stage. Since the earthworks and retaining wall construction, I have cleaned and moved the IBC's down to the back left side of the retaining wall as intended. I have also cut the metal stands (pictured above) to an appropriate height for planting and maintenance.