In the aftermath I found that we had quite a lot of food that was not accounted for and had fallen out of memory of being bought. After a quick stock take there appears to be at least 15-20 meals that could be had, all that needs to be added is a few veggies or some salad. The menu could go on all night, 8 pieces of rump steak, 3kg of mince beef, chicken mince, meatballs, sausages, lamb chops, bacon, hash browns, pork chops… How much of this food could go to waste if left sit for too long to get frost bite.

All of that meat would come to around $150 if we were to buy it from the butcher now, so as not to be wasteful we now have a push to eat our way through the freezer before buying any more meat. Sitting beside the freezer is a list showing each of the items that were ‘discovered’, as we go through we’ll cross them off.

How much good food is lurking in your deep freezer?

After moving into our new house, we spent a couple of hours over the weekend looking around my new garden. What we found was a lot of poor soil and what seems like an acre of weed mat in the garden beds!

My past experiences with weed mat have not been good, and this one is not much better. What I find funny in this situation is that there was quite a collection of weeds growing on top!

- Poor water infiltration / increased runoff
With all of that synthetic material on top of the soil, all it can be doing is blocking water and any added nutrients from reaching the roots of your prized plants.
- Lower oxygen levels in the soil
Funnily enough, healthy soil & plants need oxygen to grow to their potential. A layer of plastic, even woven plastic, prevents the natural passage of oxygen from the air to the soil.
- Discourages worms
The gardeners best friend will be driven from or discouraged from tending your garden for you.
- Strangles trees
When removing the weed mat from the front garden bed it was apparent that the trees had grown significantly since the installation. What was troubling was the difficulty and potential damage being caused by the removal of the weed mat.

Although there are a number of different weed mat products on the market, including organic weed mat, I am a firm believer in a good thick layer of mulch and a little weeding will be better in the ling run.

What a big fortnight it has been!
Moving house has really taken it out of R and I, but the enthusiasm to garden is coming back. Below are some photos of our new back yard, there is some framework for a huge tropical oasis garden. I think I counted 11 palm trees in the yard!

What was a kids sandpit area will now be extended and made into a dirt vegetable garden to supplement my aquaponics system. I look to grow the bulky or large quantity vegetables such as pumpkin, onions, tomatoes etc and leave the AP for herbs, lettuce and other nutrient hungry plants.

Zero garden down the side of the entertaining area. Will be filled with horse manure and planted with large shrubby palms and hibiscus.

Shot of the entertaining area.

An existing garden bed with a huge Cycad and cardboard palm.

Back door garden. Needs some tidy up and a prune back.

This is going to be a great adventure for us both, now to get back to work!

Since the birth of this blog there have been some mentions of my family, so here they all are (except my wife, she’s shy… that’s what she says anyway…)

Maggie, or Margret when she’s in trouble, is a three year old cat. Not sure what kind of genetic line she comes from, but she is wonderfully affectionate to me, does not like many other people. Maggie is most famous for her funny face when she yawns and terrorising the neighborhood dogs.

Abby, the long member of the family. We picked Abby up from the pound when she was about 12 weeks old. She was so small that she would fit between my hand and my elbow, today she measures a mere one meter long (3.2 foot). Sausage as she is more affectionately known loves hunting lizards and chasing pigeons. She has a very big bark, and possibly a big bite for the person who dares to break into our house.

Taylah is my big girl. Having always had a German Shepherd Dog in the house when I was growing up, I heard about the puppies that Taylah’s breeders had and fell in love (who can’t love a GSD puppy?). Tay has had some runs in the show ring, coming out with Best of Breed in a number of shows. She loves to eat bones, chase balls, wrestle with Sausage and lick and nuzzle at Angus.

Hyphen is a foster cat, she was on death row as her owner was going overseas. Being 16 and diabetic is not much of a selling point. After two months at our house she recovered from her diabetes (cats can do that), and became much more affectionate. Her owners have now stopped traveling and are getting ready for her arrival in New Zealand. Hyphen will be remembered for running through the paint roller tray and running and sliding across the polished floor boards.

Who has never dreamed of having a Tiger or a Leopard for a pet? As owning exotic animals such as this is not legal in Australia, we have opted for the next best thing, a Bengal Cat. Angus has only been with us for two days at time of writing, but already he has Taylah under his spell (she loves cats and thinks he is her puppy).

There is the run down on the family. Everyone likes to garden in their own way, Tay & Sausage dig holes while the cats like to hunt and lounge in the sun.

What do you get when you cross a tank full of fish and a vegetable garden?

You get a very productive food producing system called Aquaponics!

Over the weekend I ducked down to my local nursery and ordered a Balcony Kit aquaponics setup. I wish I had the balcony to put it on, but the kit is small enough to fit comfortably in a small space. Measuring only 2.7m by 1.5m and 97cm  high there are three grow beds that have the capacity to feed three people consistently (both fish and veggies).

Aquaponics works on the theory of growing plants in an inert media such as expanded clay pebbles with an ebb and flow water system, as is done in an hydroponic setup. The similarities of the two systems end there. Where hydroponics requires the regular addition of nutrients to the water, aquaponics uses fish to create nutrients.

The system works by adding fish food to the water, the fish eat the food, their by products are pumped into grow beds where natural bacteria turn ammonia into nitrogen which plant roots suck up and grow prolifically. Nutrient free water is then drained back into the tank for the process to start again.

Not only do you get a supply of vegetables, but as the fish grow to plate size you can take them to the kitchen as well!

So why am I giving away growing most of my vegetables in dirt you ask? Living in a tropical environment there are many problems I have found when growing in dirt, I’ve had more than my fair share of fungus, mealy bugs, weeds, birds, ants, weeds etc to deter the most enthusiastic gardener from even trying to get their plot growing to any kind of respectable standard. Not to forget over watering, under watering, over fertilising, under fertilising, digging the soil, conditioning the soil… the list goes on!

Call me lazy, but given my hectic work schedule these days the time to spend in the vegetable garden is getting limited (especially in the cooler months with less daylight hours!). I’ve see aquaponics as a way of getting the best food home grown food for my family as I can with less time input, or working smarter instead of harder!

So you can only grow leafy greens in aquaponics?
Not at all, many forums such as AquaponicsHQ and BackyardAquaponics have members that have had great success with root vegetables such as Beetroot & Carrot. Other popular vegetables include Corn, Peas, Beans, Tomatoes, Cabbage, Chili, Capsicum, Lettuce, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Egg Plant, Celery, Strawberries… Murray from Aquaponics.net.au has even grown a PawPaw tree!

Added Nutrients:
As the system is almost closed, the fish food is the only main additive, there can be times where plants become stressed due to nutrient deficiencies. Iron, Magnesium and boron deficiencies can be common, especially when your plants are getting large. Cheelated Iron, Epsom salts and borax can all be added safely (in small quantities) to the water without detriment to the fish. To reduce the need for additional nutrients a high quality fish food with a full range of minerals should be used.

Pest control:
Unlike dirt gardening, where you can get away with a squirt of insecticide now and then, any form of pest control in an aquaponics system must be organic. Should you go through with a dose of insecticide there will be a tank of floating fish. White oil, chili and garlic sprays and diluted milk will be you new best friends.

The planting density in an Aquaponics setup can be fairly thick given the even spread of nutrients from the water. Reports from forums state that you can plant most things at around half to 1/3 of the spacings that are recommended for dirt gardening. This won’t apply to plants such as cabbage or possibly tomatoes which spread to a large size.

Right now, I’ve got the area measured up, some seedlings getting ready to transplant, and another week or so to wait till my kit turns up!

After opening the box and reading the instructions, the contstruction was simple. Only needed a 10mm spanner, a phillips head screw driver and  a shifter to put it together and total build time was about 20 minutes.

In the past I have looked around online for a set of instructions to build one, but with limited time these days a purchase was much easier. Here are a couple of links to some great DIY Compost Tumblers: DIY Compost Tumbler DIY Compost Tumbler #2

I’ve just mowed all of the lawns to create something to compost and the bin is only half full. As a supliment and to kickstart the composting process, a couple of handfulls of Dynamic Lifter (chicken manure pellets) and Seasol (Seaweed emulsion) were added.

The instructions in the box say that the bin should be tumbled every two to three days to produce compost in four weeks, but I will be tumbling every day to try and speed things up!

Here is my new Compost Tumbler with my two dogs, Taylah (German Shepherd Dog) and Abby (Daschund X).

After reading Lifehacker the other day, a little motivation crept in to build a new bin and grow my own potatoes again. This will be a multi post project that will document all the stages from planting to growing!

Years ago I grew many kilograms of potatoes in a stack of old car tyres with great results, but some became rotten when they sat inside the lip of the tyres in water that had collected.

The Parts:

I obtained a few old partly broken pallets a few months back for free from a local supply company. Not sure what I was going to do with them, the were left in a stack up the back yard to slowly rot and split in the sun. My dog Abby liked to chase the lizards that would hide in them. After a long stressful day at work, I felt the need to destroy something (the pallets) and make some noise.

After ripping the nails out and cutting the planks in half (~55mm), a few nails and a bit of sweat later the frame work had been knocked up. My wife even came out to see what the comotion was about and stayed to nail most of it together. She is quite handy when she wants to be!

Take no notice of my carpentry skills! Think that may be why I am a geologist and not a tradesman.

So where to now?
Firstly the bin needs to be placed on some weed free soil, and filled with some soil which is rich in organic matter (about level with the top of the bottom board). The seed potatoes will be planted in this soil, then topped off with some straw.

Once the potatoes have started to grow, new boards will be added to the edges and the bin filled with straw up to the top of the new boards. By using straw, the potatoes will grow in a dirt free environment which will save you time in the kitchen (no dirty spuds to wash!), it also makes for easy picking as you can fish through the straw to find the potatoes!

There have been a couple of casualties, but nothing that was not expected, and a couple of nice surprises.

My Arrowroot plants have been belted around by the wind a fair bit and coupled with a reduction in water, they have now had a big prune and a large drink to reinvigorate them. The leaves and stems which are high in nutrients, with the leaves and shoots containing 10% protein, have been used to mulch my other garden beds.

My tomato plants which were fruiting well when I left are now fruiting even better! I think that is due to my neighbor keeping a special eye on them and watering them regularly so she could get a supply of fresh tomatoes for her kitchen!

My passionfruit vine is looking very sick and sun burnt. I think a couple of shoots from below the graft have gotten away from me and are not producing fruit. A job for this week is to prune hard, feed lots and water well.

I have discovered an outbreak of a sticky seeded weed ground cover in my lawn. Each plant has spread to be around 1m round, and the seeds are sticking to the dog’s fur which will spread them nicely! A huge campaign of removal was done yesterday afternoon, but there is still a large amount of seed left on the ground which will require management when they germinate.

Overall I am very happy with the state of the yard, there is plenty of work to do but I have a 4 day long weekend comming up!

How many mealy bugs can you fit on a tomato stalk?

I was not sure myself until I found this branch in my garden over the weekend!

For us Gardening Australia tragics, we have all met Stephen before where he has co-hosted many segments from his garden ‘Tugurium’ in Macedon Victoria with John Patrick.

Stephen has come from a long history of gardening, he began with an apprenticeship in gardening and turf management where he recieved an Award of Merit. Afterwards he was awarded two schollarships, one in New Zealand and the other in the UK. After returning to Australia he worked in his familys nursery before he began his own in 1980.

Stephen brings with him a wealth of knowledge as well as a fresh and dynamic approach to the show, which is sure to impress the younger audience (it’s impressed me!).

I look forward to many more episodes from Stephen!

You can get the Gardening Australia PodCast free from the iTunes Store or from the Gardening Australia website