Date:  Jun 8, 2016

Urban farming is becoming very popular.  What is urban farming?  It means, you grow your food inside your home.

One of the question most people have is,

“Do you want a beautify balcony?”

Or

“Do you want to make good use of your balcony and do not care about how it looks?”

Of course, my answer is to stay healthy.

And to stay healthy, you really have to move away from taking in too much pesticides and chemicals into your body.  So, organic food seems to be a right solution to stay healthy.

The more organic food you take in, the more healthy you will be.  It is not an easy task, but it is achievable.  it is a slowly changing habit.  It takes time.  And it is sometimes costly to buy organic food from the market too.  And sometimes, you also wonder, how sure are you that the organic food you buy is really organic?  So, if you can, be like us, grow some vegetables in your balcony.  And the easiest way is to go Aquaponics.

This is the balcony at my home.  As you can see from the previous post, the Aquaponics systems has been upgraded.

I got a newer systems on the left, and old systems is still functioning well.

Aquaponics is how you make your plants and fish grow together in a system.  It is different from hydroponic because hydroponic grows food using water and the nutrients are usually “chemicals”.  Aquaponics plants got their nutrients from the fish below.

It is a very simple process indeed.  The fish will poo.  The fish poo poo has Ammonia.  You need a water pump to pump this naturally nutritious Ammonia water into the plants above.  The microbes & worms will convert the fish poo poo water into nitrate, which is the fertiliser.  Then, all the plants absorbed and eat the nitrate.  And clean water are returned backed to the fish pond below.  Ready to get fertilised by the fish poo poo again.  So, it is a “System”.  And you will need sunlight, if sunlight is not enough.  And you need some tricks here and there to hold the water so that the plants can absorb the nitrates and so on.

Let’s check out the new systems.

We have 5 boxes.

The bottom one is the fish pond.  Here we have some big fish here as we have more plants growing above.

As our balcony does not get a lot of sun lights, we solve the problem with “Growth Light”.

As you can see all the veggies are growing well.

The R&D department (my wife) is researching the best way to grow a certain veggies, etc.  That is her expertise.  If you have any questions at all, you can ask her ya, don’t ask me.  I am just an electrician and computer engineer.  Wahahahahahaha

More plants are grown here.

Geese…. my wife really grow a lot of different thing to try out.  hahaha

Our old systems still exist.  Once the plant grew bigger, we moved it here.

Smaller fish, but a lot more of them.

And the veggies are growing very healthily.

At the moment, we produced enough for putting veggies in the bread and salad.  But not enough for daily zi-char.

See how fresh and fatty the veggies is?  It is all home grown.

It takes about 4-5 weeks to grow until like this from 1-2 single pods.  So, you need to schedule and time the growing.  It is fun.

We also made our own bread with Chai Seeds.  And it goes will with cheese and the organic veggies from our Aquaponics farm.

This is the incubator.  Where seeds becomes small plants before transferring into the Aquaponics there.

There are many things we benefits too.

1.  We taught the kids what is “System”.  Science for primary school.
2. We taught them since young to grow their own food.  What if an asteroid hit the earth, and you are lucky to survive in the wild.  The kids need to learn how to get fit, swim, and grow their own food.
3. We taught them why we need to eat Organic food.  To stay away from cancer and other illness.
4. They spent times with the Aquaponics and remove some TV times, iPad/iPhone or Xbox time.
5. If you have old folks at home, there is a new tasks for them.  To learn and take care of the plants.  To feel proud of what you grow.

As I said, if you want to know how to have a Aquaponics systems in your home, be it above your fish tank, at the balcony, etc, you can ask my wife, (not me ya), I am just an electrician and computer programmer.  HaHaHaHa…