Today i want to share a few images i took this morning from the greenhouse.

So this is the current setup for the aquaponics. I plan to have another flood and drain tray to the right again but the tray i used last year had a crack and i was slowly loosing water. So i plan to replace it with the other tray i already have setup. I also hope to have a little more support  setup this year so the tray can stay level and not weigh down on the tank directly.

Something i am trying is using that rain gutter extension as my water return. So far it seems to work well but i am worried now that we are out of the store that it might be too not dark, ie will let too much light in and let algae grow in the return which is not something i want. However, i am thinking i might be able to put some clay pebbles in these tubes with light holes cut in them and have an easy to make drip tube. The ridges should hold the pebbles well enough as long as i can get enough pebbles to stay in place for the plants to be able to grow a reasonable root system.

These two picture what i was able to grow or over winter with no heat. A fairly sad Swish Chard (Top) and some fairly healthy lettuce (Left) even if i started with eight heads and now i have like 3. That just means that i will be able to use this tray for something else soon, right?

This is the current salad bowl trays, to the left (or top damn werdpress fuckn tags hello!) is lettuce and the right (bottom) spinach. They are doing well and are right on plan.

Most of the tomatoes we started from seeds are taking off. I ordered i guess two different breeds this year, Big Beef and Sugar Sweetie. If i am lucky i will like the taste of one of them. But i wouldn’t count on it. And i assume that we will end up picking up at least 3 or 4 more that are ready to plant from the store later, we always do.

Speaking of things from seeds. I ordered like 5 different HOT peppers this year. Including the Trinidad Scorpion aka the hottest pepper around at about 1,463,700 Scovilles. For some degree of scale a Jalapeno rocks s cool 3500-8000 Scovilles. My brother in law was taking a good game last year about eating all the peppers. We will see, we will see.

Guess, i will end with one last image of the strawberries that wintered over. They look like shit but hey if i don’t have to buy new strawberries… well shit i already did and i planted like 30 of them in one of the buckets. I might have a lot of strawberries. Tasty.

In other planting/Gurobo Farms news looks like we are going to try potatoes, bulb onions, and garlic. We haven’t grown any of these things well not intentionally anyway.  Also we have decided to add ducks to our backyard farm animals. Yep, Old McGruobo had a farm E-I-E-I-O. Hell i am even debating on adding a float try to the system full of crawfish. Why not one more group of animals?

<3s