Transplanting from dirt into an aquaponic grow bed
When I potted
up my summer seedlings
a week ago, I pulled out a few basil plants along with a pepper and
tomato to go in the aquaponics setup. First, I carefully washed
most of the dirt off their roots...
...then I inserted the
plants into the growing bed.
A week later, all are
still alive, and the tomato especially is thriving. I think this might
actually be a better way of planting into a grow bed than starting
seeds directly in rock wool --- the on/off cycle of the water flushing
through the bed is a little rough on young seedlings and seems to be
more appropriate for mid-sized plants.
Now to see if these
newcomers will live where everything except celery has thus far failed
to thrive.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Maybe I'm no the one to ask. After all, I refuse to tell the Emperor that I like his new zoot suit, and I don't think the Elephant Man looks anything at all like an elephant.
And I think all the hype about hydro- or aquaponics is undeserved. It's a pain in the patoot to set it up, requires a good deal of on-going monitoring and there's an increased risk of total failure due to some technical mishap. My small scale experimental foray into the process also seemed to show that starting seeds in soil instead of a special medium was better.
Why do we need to "improve" on growing things in soil like the goddess Ceres originally intended?