2014 Articles

The 2014 entries have been minimized and consolidated to the text on this page. If you are interested in the photos during this period, they are available, in reverse chronological order, on our website construction page: PICS HERE

October 30th: We got overrun with aphids and had to toss a lot of the plants.

I tried spraying some with GreenCure to maybe smother some of the aphids and also add potassium to the plants. After a few trials it seemed useless for controlling the aphids, very little difference in plant health, and had a number of mosquito fish die off about the same time so discontinued its use.

Tossed more plants and cleaned, but I had to keep some plants growing to clean the nitrates from the water for the fish. Really need to get a second system running so that I can take one down if needed without killing off all of the fish.

October 1st: Finished most of the inside wall braces in the walk-in cooler. Starting to caulk all of the seams to prepare for a food grade epoxy coating.

Had a tissue analysis done on the lettuce in the aqua house. They showed low potassium. Supplementing a 5% chelated (OMRI approved) potassium.

September 28th: Covered the 10' x 52' dirt floor hoop house with plastic.

July 21st: Finished attaching hoop-house Trex base boards. Completed the cooler insulated ceiling and finished building the cooler roof supports for an overhead track.

July 8th: Finished interior walls of cooler.

June 27th: Picked up the wiggle wire and track for the new hoop house (still need a few Trex boards for the outside bottom support).

June 21st: Cut pipes for the new hoop house located in the orchard for anchors and sidewalls. Installed them in the ground and leveled. Started bending 28 pipes for the bows.

June 10th: Two Schaeffer VK12 HAF fans were installed to circulate the air and help cool the Aqua house.

May 31st: Orchard fence removed and site tilled and leveled for a 10'x52' hoophouse.

May 25th: Continued work on the concrete forms for the sunken aisle Aqua house.

May 15th: Continued tests with home-made coir-vermiculite Agar plugs to minimize transplanting.

May 5th: Took delivery of a New Holland Boomer 30 tractor.

April 13th: Continued work on the walk-in cooler. Somewhat stymied by the lack of 6" to 7" screws. May have to rebuild a wall.

March 21st: Approximately 400 tomato plants of eight varieties started to test growth rates and dates and to sell some as starts.

March 16th: Rewriting all farm scripts to use a database (MySQL) rather than flat files for data storage.

Installing the second 'radial filter' made with one of the blue food grade barrels. It is placed after the large (4'x8'x4') fish tank and flows into the bio filter tank.

March 13th: Installed a 'radial filter' ... basically a 55 gallon barrel that has the tank water flow down a large diameter center column and slowly rise to the top to spill over, settling solids to the bottom of the barrel as it does.

This first filter was installed between the small and large fish tanks ... so it is filtering the water coming out of the small tank before it goes into the larger fish tank.

March 10th: Gradually finishing up the 'vet' tank. Another 2 feet by 2 feet by four feet high plywood and epoxy tank. Working on the last coats of exterior white paint along with some trim. Should be ready in a few days.

March 3rd: Made a trip to Eugene and picked up four 55 gallon blue food grade barrels for settling filters to put between each fish tank.

February 15th: Fish tank water, at a depth of 3-1/2 feet, is getting too murky. So I dumped about 2/3 of the tanks water, twice, over the last couple of weeks and refilled with spring water.

I added several fine mesh bag filters over the last week but they are not doing much. They do catch about a handful of the larger solids each day. Conducting research to decide on what type of filtering might be practical for this size system (and larger) without having to pull and clean filters every few hours.

January 30th: Finished installing the one wire temperature sensors (two in the troughs, two in the fish tanks, two in the air above the troughs and one outside).

Configured and installed the Quantum sensor. Built web scripts to scrape and back up the temperature data (saved every 10 minutes) and light data (saved every minute) from their web interfaces and calculate average temps and total PAR light over every 24 hours.

Spent some time and effort upgrading all of our farm scripts for keeping track of starts, transplants, and harvests, including crop times in each phase and harvested plant weights.

January 11th: I was originally going to set up some monitoring equipment by building my own Arduino based devices, but found a web based unit that accepts eight temperature sensors and controls three relays for just a few hundred dollars.

I've attached the wire end connectors to the temperature sensors and will start placing them in the aqua house over the next few days. I've completed the scripts to access the temps and save them to a local file.

I also purchased a Quantum meter to measure the actual amount of PAR light in the aqua house during our dark and overcast winter days.

As expected, the amount of light available has been pretty low. Values (in moles/sq meter - day) were 4.3, 5.3, 4.0, 5.6, 5.4, 3.1, 1.9, 2.1, 2.2, 3.4 and 2.0 for the first eleven days of January. The suggested amount of PAR light for growing crops commercially is about 12-13 moles per day for leafy vegetables with other sources suggesting 11 moles minimum. Needless to say, our crops are maturing quite slowly without added artificial light.