One Good Turn

Meg in New York with Mormon Helping Hands after Hurricane Sandy

This past Thanksgiving weekend I was planning to prepare my garden for the winter. But Hurricane Sandy had hit New York City hard that fall, so I joined a group of volunteers to help clean up in Queens instead. The damage was amazing, even several weeks after the storm hit. Here were a few more pictures I took during that weekend. The first is a car damaged by the storm, the next one of the houses we helped clear out (this picture is after the dump truck took away most of the contents of this home, newly remodeled only the prior November).





I dont regret the time I spent in New York, but my own yard remained messy throughout the winter. There were remains from various projects, yard debris, and general unkemptness. Heres a couple of shots showing the mess:





Then my local Mormon missionaries stopped by this past month. "Is there anything we could do to help you?" they asked.

"Anything?" I said. "Well, I could use some help with my back yard..."

They were good to their word and showed up last Saturday, ready to make quick work of a mess that had bothered me all winter. Heres a couple of shots after theyd moved the trash out of my yard:





Yeah missionaries! Many hands make light work. Now I can get started on my spring garden without hours of dirty, heavy lifting in my way!

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Aquaponics Using a Swirl Filter to Remove Solid Waste

Ive been having a lot of problems with uneaten fish food and fish waste building up in our grow beds.  We have used old nylons to capture the waste, but they needed to be cleaned often.

I decided to construct a swirl filter to filter out the solid waste.  This particular type of filter allows solid waste to settle to the bottom, only needs to be flushed out once a month, and the waste can be used as fertilizer for our garden and houseplants.

In this video, I discuss the importance of filtering solids from aquaponics systems as well as show you my swirl filter design. I also discuss how the swirl filter works and show you the effects of not using one (not pretty).

Thanks for watching!  Let me know if you have any questions.
Todd





This post has been shared at:  Homestead Barn Hop, Simple Saturdays Blog Hop

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Q A Keeping fish waste from clogging the sump pump

From time to time someone tracks me down and asks a great question. I usually end up spending a minor chunk of time answering. Heres a recent question I thought might be of interest:

Hello Meg,

Thanks for 365 Aquaponics. I find it very informative for my future plans in aquaponics. I had some quick questions- How do you keep fish waste from cloggin up the sump pump?

Thank you very much! Regards, R

Heres what I do:

• I have relatively narrow pipes taking overflow water from my fish tank to my sump. This is not a good thing - if I were doing this over again, Id make sure my drain to the sump was at least 2 inches in diameter. Its a solids lifting overflow, so its supposed to suck the fish tank wastes out, and it does, to a certain extent.
  
  
• I dont have a swirl filter. This is also not a good thing. I really like the swirl filter in the HD Aquaponics youtube videos (episodes 28 and 29 show it, as I recall. I have all the parts to implement a swirl filter constructed out of a 5 gallon water bottle sometime soon.
  
  
• I have goldfish in my sump tank. They love to munch on stuff. So they keep the sump tank pretty clear. I also have a cover over my sump tank.
  
  
• My pump is slightly elevated. I originally put it on a 1 inch thick plastic mesh pad (repurposed the internal pump filter) because I wanted to reduce the noise of the pump. But elevating the pump does three other great things:

1. The plastic mesh isnt inside my pump. Leaving the plastic mesh filter inside the pump can leave you with a nasty slimy mess that you have to clean frequently. If you still want to have some waste filtration, put an external mesh bag filter over your pump.
   
   
2. The waste that is in the system falls to the bottom of my sump. Since the pump is ever so slightly elevated, chunks of gunk are less likely to get sucked into the pump.
   
   
3. If the water level in my sump tank gets low, the pump stops emptying the tank when theres still an inch or so of water in the tank. My goldfish who live in the sump tank are still able to get around and remain in water, so Im pretty happy about that "accident."

Good luck!

Meg

____________________________________

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Suburban Aquaponics Using Compost Worms to Break Down Solid Waste

Check out this video to learn more about using compost worms in an indoor aquaponics system. I have been waiting for quite a long time to have enough worms and the right conditions to start adding my red wigglers to the aquaponics grow beds. Today is that day! I started a very basic worm bin almost a year ago and have although it started out pretty rough it has really started to be a constant source of worms and worm castings for various gardening projects around the homestead. I have learned to pace feeding the worms to a minimum until the population is big enough to consume everything you are throwing in the bin. So, with the bin working well and the worms multiplying like, well, like worms, it is time to start taking some out and taking them to the water park AKA the aquaponics system.

I am just going to be adding small amounts of worms to the grow beds each month. This will give the worm population in the worm bin a chance to recover and for more organic "stuff" to build up in the beds for them to feed on. I am excited to get the worms going in the beds as I have heard nothing but great things about this additional symbiotic relationship. The worms are going to help plants grow even better and work as an additional cleaner for the water and grow beds.

The idea with the compost worms and aquaponics is that you are always going to have uneaten fish food, dead roots, fish waste, and other organic material that build up over time in the grow beds. Over time this can cause quite a mess and cause you to have to empty the entire bed and clean things up. With the worm in there doing their work the time in between cleanups should be much greater and in the meantime the worms are breaking down that extra waste into more nutrients for the plants.

Many people have suggested that the worms should be used in place of a swirl or radial flow filter and that is something that I do not agree with. There is just too much waste that would get into the grow beds too quickly for the worms to keep up. I think that the ultimate solution to the solids waste problem in a flood and drain system is to utilize both some kind of settlement filter and the worms together. I have demonstrated in several videos just how much waste builds up in the beds in just a short amount of time and I just dont think that worms alone, as awesome as they are, can keep up with the cleanup duties.

 

 

Check out the Simple Suburban Living General Store

for more products used and recommend by the SSL Family

 

 

The worms can be ordered here:

250 worms:  http://amzn.to/1wRsKuP
500 worms:  http://amzn.to/13FJR9m
2000 worms:  http://amzn.to/1sN6NyX

 

 

 

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Garbage 101 Adopt a Meat Garbage Disposal Never Waste Food Ever Again

"40 percent of food purchased for the home is wasted.  Half of the worlds produced food is wasted."  Thats a huge amount of food wasted, food produced but never eaten.  And certainly most of that wasted food ends up in landfills. 

We are proud to announce that we  here at Simple Suburban Living waste 0% of our food.  Absolutely no food whatsoever finds its way from our house into a landfill.  Remember from yesterdays post that landfills should be the last resort for our waste.

All of our food scraps get fed to the dog or chickens, and anything they dont eat ends up in our compost piles.  We have a worm compost bin in the basement, and a compost pile in the backyard. 

Our chickens are our vegetable, grain, fruit, and dairy garbage disposals.  They are fed chicken feed also, but they just love the food scraps, too. 

 

 

 

 

~ Our Meat Garbage Disposal ~

 

If you have ever read the ingredients on most dog food packages, you will notice the first ingredient listed is corn.  You dont even want to get me started on the subject of corn, but more importantly, dogs are not meant to eat corn.  They are carnivores.  They need meat.  With that said, our dog eats all of our meat scraps and leftover meat.  We do give her dog food also, but not nearly as much as we used to because her diet is supplemented with our leftovers.  We have noticed a huge improvement in her coat and bathroom habits since weve changed her diet. 

 

You can help save the environment and a stray by adopting a faithful friend and meat disposer.?

 

 

 

To make things easier and more convenient, we keep food "garbage" bowls on our kitchen counter.  One bowl is for the chickens, the other for the worms and compost pile.  We found that we compost more when we dont have to walk the food scraps outside.  In other words, we found that we are a very lazy environmentally-minded folk.


Serving our food waste to the animals and compost piles is now an integral part of our life and the changes were easily implemented over a short period of time.  Even the girls take an active part and know where to separate the food scraps.  I just love it when the youngest SSL Kid says "compost".

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” --Maya Angelou   


This post was shared at:  Homestead Barn Hop, The Backyard Farming Connection Hop, Homestead Blog Hop

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Garbage 101 Ways to Reuse Paper Waste Around Your Home

In our first Garbage 101 article, we discussed it was best to keep paper and other biodegradable materials out of landfills as much as possible.  We are lucky enough to have a recycling service that picks up our recyclables every two weeks, but we really try to reuse as much of our paper waste as possible before we even consider recycling it.

It all starts with our recycling bins where all of our paper waste is sorted.  We added labels to the bins for the girls.  We even had a LANDFILL sign on our trash at one point.  It was a good reminder to us all. 

The trick to sustainability is viewing your trash as a resource instead of garbage, and we have found lots of re-uses for paper around our home.

Cardboard makes great landscape fabric.  It keeps the weeds out, just lay the mulch right over it.

We have had a problem with rabbits eating our new bushes and trees.  So we reuse our paper towel and toilet paper rolls and wrap them around the base.  It has worked like a charm!  The SSL Family Dad has a post and video on this topic.

After we have weeded out the boxes for landscape fabric & storage, and the paper towel rolls for the trees, we then shred everything else.  But first we separate the glossy paper out.  The non-glossy paper and non-glossy boxes are shredded separately and used for the outdoor compost pile and worm bin. 

The glossy paper and boxes are then shredded and soaked in water for up to a week so that it all breaks down.  The SSL Family Dad then takes that soggy paper mess and turns it into paper logs with this paper log maker that he burns in our outdoor wood burning stove.  We use this stove to heat our pool in the summer and heat our garage in the winter. 

Here is the contraption my wonderful husband put together for the shredding and soaking of glossy paper.  He mounted our old paper shredder on top of a 55-gallon barrel that he cut in half.   Yes, were weird.  And yes, some things around our house are weird.  But because marriage is all about balance, I would like to think that I balance things out and keep things from getting TOO weird around here.  (Lets just not ask the SSL Family Dad about that, okay?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This post has been shared at:  Homestead Barn Hop, Homestead Blog Hop, The Backyard Farming Connection Hop

 

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