Algae Eater

Last Saturday, I added an algae eating fish to the open air fish tank with the koi in it cause there was just a ton of algae. Below is the photo showing how much it’s improved since it was added.

Neat, right? It’ll probably all be completely gone by this weekend. Nuts. It means there will be more nutrients for the plants since the algae won’t be there to suck them up. Awesome!

Water Testing

 

It’s been months since I tested the water out in the unit cause honestly it’s fine 99% of the time. I’m still kind of concerned that the water is screwing with the growth of the plants, but maybe not. The water looks like it’s within acceptable levels for growth, it might just be that I don’t have enough fish in the tanks to generate the kind of nutrients the plants need. I’m thinking of bumping up to one more goldfish as well as adding in some variety for the food cause to date I’ve only fed them fish flakes. According to a couple different sources, including the Petsmart employee I spoke to the other day, i need to throw some veggies in there. Like a sliced strip of some vegetable that slips my mind right now. I’ll probably throw it in there tomorrow morning.

Garlic Comparison

In a bid to avoid boredom, I went out and dug up along the sides of the garlic I planted to see how they were doing. Here’s what I got.

They don’t look that far apart in terms of growth, but it’s got me thinking that I will be waiting until July to harvest. There is a lot of green up top, but that could even out with a bit more time in the ground I’m hoping. The problem is that I feel like I need to harvest it all at once since they’re all in the same growbed cause I’ll be drying it.

Anyway…. I guess I should find something to do….

Harvest Valve Update

So today, in advance of the harvest that I’m anticipating doing next weekend (a whole 7 garlic bulbs, BOOYAH!) I added valves so I could shut off flow to one side of the unit or the other. The point, as I said in yesterdays post, is to give the garlic a day or two on one side to dry a bit and stay more intact for harvest.

But, whoops, as you can see on the right I forgot I had that pipe running between the two units. I’m going to cut that one in the middle and add a valve just before I shut off flow to the that side. That’s because I’ll be disrupting the caulk that I’ve got on there, potentially creating another leak issue.  But since I’ll be letting that side spend a day drying out of the bed, I can re-caulk after and let it dry normally as opposed to the crappy “blow dryer” drying I’ve been doing to make sure the plants don’t get dried out.