Grow your Own – Page 2 – Sustainable Life Birmingham

Re-use old Seeds

Some seeds are healthy and bursting full of flavour – just add water! This week we had a big clearout of some of our older seed packets. These can become unreliable or you may just have decided that these seeds weren’t a great turnout for you and they have been phased out.

Check to see if the seeds can be sprouted or turned into micro-greens and use them up as part of your all year round salad.

To sprout seeds:

Place in a clean jar full of water overnight.
Empty the water out and leave in the jar on a windowsill
Rinse with water every day until sprouted
Ready to eat!

To grow Microgreens follow our handy tips on making juice box seedling containers.

Turn your Juice and Milk Cartons into Seedling Trays

It’s easy to turn your leftover Juice Cartons and Milk Cartons into seedling planters. Not all cities recycle this material so if you are stuck in a place that won’t recycle them like us, it’s a great idea to try to re-use them instead.

Cut out a rectangle shape on the top of the carton (keeping the lid tightly screwed on still. Do not cut all the way to the edge of the carton – you will need a cm roughly around the edges to keep the carton stable with the weight of the soil inside.

Then simply fill with seedling soil and plant your salad seeds. Place on a windowsill and harvest as and when you desire! The easy compact design of these cartons make them the perfect size for windowsills and the cartons are naturally leak proof and certified food safe.

Saving egg shells

Egg shells: whether you have chickens or not chances are you get through quite a few eggs in your household. Don’t throw those egg shells away though! Egg shells have good stuff like calcium in them which you or a friend may find very useful!

I grind up my egg shells and portion them out into small resealable bags For my chickens, as giving them back the calcium helps them create new eggs again!

Bear in mind – don’t give chickens whole eggs to eat, or you will teach them to eat Thier own eggs.

But it’s not just chickens that benefit from egg shells, here are a few more ideas for reusing egg shells:

If you keep snails in a fish tank (to eat algae) or pond, try adding some crushed egg shells when they have baby snails. The calcium supplement of egg shells will help the baby snails to grow big and hard shells and protect them from fish as they grow up.
add egg shells to chicken feed as an extra supplement to Thier existing diet.
Instead of using salt which can harm plants, sprinkle egg shells instead (crushed) and this will also keep snails and slugs away due to the sharp edges.
Add the egg shells to your compost as they are rich in good nutrients to help your plants.

How to Pollinate an Indoor Tomato Plant

If your tomato plant is indoors, in a greenhouse or polytunnel – do not expect to still get tomatoes even if bees have access to the plant. Tomatoes are actually self-pollinators so without an outdoor environment they will need a helping hand.

There are two main methods for pollinating your tomatoes but never fear they are very easy! When your tomato plant is in flower:

Shake Method

Hold the tomato plant and shake it rigorously but being gentle to the plant. That’s it!

Flick method

Hold the stem by the flowers and gently flick the flower heads a few times. Viola!

Then just wait it out until you see the flowers turning into tomatoes. You may also need to do this to give your tomatoes a helping hand if they don’t seem to be pollinating themselves.

How I Created my First Home Aquaponics System

After struggling for a long time with how to keep my fish tank as clean as possible (with as little effort as possible) and failing miserably I finally discovered aquaponics – and I wanted it. This system is so special it covers looking after fish, upcycling materials and growing your own food! The problem was most aquaponics systems costs hundreds of pounds and I had about a tenner to spare, if that.

I was not to be deterred however, I wanted one, so I was going to figure out how to build my own. I already had a small fish tank with a terrible water filter that dribbled out water at best and needed changing every week. I wanted to convert this into a self cleaning system that also provided food.

How Aquaponics Works

Aquaponics is amazingly simple really. All you need is a pump to pump the water from the fish tank to a tray with various sized filtering rocks in it. Here you plant a bunch of cress seeds (or even lettuce) on top of the rocks. The idea is the plants use the fish poo and turn it into nutrients to grow. Then, the water needs to be directed back down either into a second tray or into the fish tank again. The falling water being a bit cleaner than before and oxidizing the tank.

Cost to DO:

If you already have fish and a fish pump: £0
If you do not have a pump : £10 +costs of tank and fish according to your requirements.

Our zebra fish are around £7 each, snails to eat algae are 75p each (because our zebra fish are in cold water) and the tank was free from friends (you can also scour freecycle and supermarket adverts). While we did also get a free pump it broke within a few days and we had to purchase a new one – we got the cheapest one around which was £10 from our local pet store. Since we are improving the flow capability of this pump anyway a cheap one will be sufficient.

Equipment:

Glue/Glue Gun/Super Glue
Knife/Scissors
Plastic tray – such as those from supermarket bread/pastry products
Plastic tubes (we used kids toy tubes from a pirate bed – they were the perfect fit for the pump attachment!)
Gravel of different sizes (taken from the original filter and replacement filters and the fish tank gravel)
A couple of small bottles (those little innocent smoothie bottles work great)
A water pump (taken from the original filter). You can purchase a pump on its own but it’s actually cheaper to just buy the cheapest tank filter instead and get the extra gravel this way as a bonus.

Method:

First of all before we begin, I would like to let you know that the aquaponics system isn’t the one I first built. The one I will be teaching you to make today is our Aquaponics Mark II system.

The first one looked like this:

There were however several problems with this design that only emerged afterwards including:

Not enough space for cress – it grows hard and fast and we want more!
Roots clogged up holes
Holes were leaky
Fish filter pump was not enclosed enough

So we decided to create Aquaponics Mark II and significantly improved upon it’s design with some rather intuitive solutions if I do say so myself.

Step One

Gather together your materials including plastic tray (I prefer see through to maximise light access), plastic tubing, scissors, and glue (i used a glue gun before but ran out of sticks so used super glue this time).

Cut the tube into two sections: 1 long one to fit from the pump to the fish tank lid, and one short one to fit from the fish tank lid to just above the water level of the tank. The long tube will be your water out section and the short one will direct the water back in.

Step Two

Line up the plastic tray against your fish tank lid. Later on it will be glued into place but not now (just in case something goes wrong). Mark out where you want your tubes to go so that they go through the existing holes in the fish tank lid. I placed my output tube on the right hand side (so that the pump will be at the side of the tank and the power cable is closest to the wall socket). The shorter input tube I placed at the back middle of the lid/tray.

Put a hole through the marks and ease the tubes in, glue in place inside the plastic tray so that water can’t leak out (you can use bath sealant I guess if you have some spare). Allow to dry thoroughly before exposing to water.

Step Three

Take your small plastic bottle and check the water pump you have will fit inside it. The pump should be easy to remove from the fish filter and won’t require any tomfoolery. For my filter I found it fit easily with plenty of room into an innocent smoothie bottle.

Get your knife/scissors and score thin line holes at 90 degree points at the base of the bottle like in the picture above. You don’t need to widen these holes this will be plenty for the water to get into without endangering small fish.

Step Four

Remove the lid of the bottle and make a hole in the middle. Thread the long tube attached to the tray through this hole. Do not glue it in place (we want to minimise the use of glue where possible both for the fish and for the sake of easy removal and replacement of parts).

Cut the Bottle in half above the pump and slot the pump inside. There should be plenty of breathing room in there.

Cut a line hole in the top of the bottle and thread the wire through it (since it is attached to a pump at one end and a plug at the other, you need to cut a line to thread it through not just a hole for the wire). Do not seal the top of the bottle into the base yet – attach the long output tube to the pump first threaded through the open bottle top. Then screw the bottle top to the lid on the tube and finally slot the top half of the bottle inside the bottom half of the bottle so that the pump is covered and cannot trap fish.

Step Five

Secure the plastic tray to the fish tank lid with glue in the corners. If using super glue you will need to sit around for a long time. A glue gun is much faster to dry. When it is dry, place the system into the fish tank and close the lid in place. Check that the short tube is suspended inside the fish tank above the water level and that the pump bottle fills with water and is weighed down sufficiently.

Now is the time to check your system works before progressing further. It should all work fine but if your holes are too small, or too big you may have water flow problems or leaks and now is the time to fix those before finishing the system. Thankfully ours did not have leaks and had excellent water flow, yay! Remember we had a piddly slow water pump? Not anymore! Thanks to the vastly superior filter system the water flow was much better, some pre-built fish water filters are just designed very badly. Time to move on…

Step Six

In this design we also created a removable tube protection system that acted as an additional filter. This device will use the bio sponge found in your old fish filter providing a third method of cleaning the water. This sponge needs regular cleaning, so its important it’s not fixed into place – which means a tricky problem to solve for our aquaponics system. We found in our Aquaponics Mark I system, placing the sponge into the tube meant daily cleaning required and a vastly reduced water flow so this time we went for something a bit more daring.

Take your second small bottle and cut the top off. Then cut a small rectangle (smaller than the bio sponge you have) into the bottom side of the bottle.

Then with the bottom half of the bottle cut a thin strip off the top so it makes a circle like this.

Slot the strip of plastic into the base of the top half of the bottle so that it covers the rectangular hole you created. You should find the plastic bends inwards a bit creating a gap as the plastic ring is slightly bigger than the bottle top half. This is great and just what we need to get water through the sponge so align this inward bend so that it is behind the rectangular hole you created.

Then place the sponge between the plastic like above. It will be clamped in to place by the plastic strip but still allow water to pass through the sponge. Your tube protection device can now be sat on the plastic tray around the shorter tube hole. This will help stop roots clogging up the tube and provide an extra filter for the water exiting the system. Not all of the water will go through the sponge but it will capture a lot. It does not need anything to weigh it down – it will be heavy enough and the water flow won’t disturb it.

When the sponge gets brown – rinse it under a tap and then replace it. Turn the bottle top periodically to sever ambitious roots heading for your tube hole.

Step Seven

Fill the tray with your smallest gravel from the filter, then the second smallest, then the biggest and finally with the gravel from the bottom of your fish tank (after you have cleaned it all). This creates several layers of filtration. Make sure the level of the gravel is higher than the stable water level when the pump is on to help prevent seed movement.

Finally, scatter some cress seeds on the gravel, put your fish tank by a window and turn on the pump. Check the water flow is still good to ensure sufficient oxidisation of the water for the fish. Wait 3-6 days and eat the resulting cress – plant more on top and repeat the process!

If you do not have a spare window you can get a special growing LED bulb plate to fix above your fish tank but this will cost around £20.

Congratulations, you are finished!

Great job on getting this far, you now have your own aquaponics system that will/is:

Oxidise your water
Provide a multi-filtration system by: Plants, Gravel layers and Bio Sponge
Provide quick and easy to grow healthy food to snack on and use in salads (the kids will LOVE this!)
Make happier healthier fish
Reduced cleaning for your fish tank required (deep clean once a month if the water starts going green and consider adding one or two water snails).
An amazing self sufficient system you didn’t pay £400 for.

In a few days your tray will look something like this one did (picture from Aquaponics Mark I):

Experimental Avocado

I am going to try to grow my own avocado tree in the UK. This will be grueling, unrewarding and lengthy so it’s not for the faint of heart!

You can germinate your avocado pip in a few different ways apparently. However, if you can get a seedling this is meant to be easier and more reliable for a tasty crop. I’m just going to turn the Hass Avocado I bought from Sainsbury’s into a tree and see what happens.

Things to note:

You may not get fruit
If you do get fruit it may not be tasty, even if the original avocado was
It WILL be big, easily up to 6 foot if not kept pruned and contained/stunted.
It WILL need to be kept warm and safe from frost
It WILL take at least 3 years before you see any returns at all

Avocados like soil of PH around 6 and a sandy texture soil works best. Make sure it also has great drainage or it will not be happy!

Your Avocado seed will look something like this:

How to Germinate Your Seed

You can do this in two main ways, first of all you can plant it in a large pot of well drained soil with the pointy end upwards. I have also put a plastic bag around the pot to keep it warm and moist while it germinates, remember to remove this bag as soon as germination occurs.

This method works particularly well with most seeds that thrive in warmer climates such as Squash, Tomato and Cucumber.

Or alternatively you can place three toothpicks into the seed around the middle and suspend the pip over a beaker of water using the toothpicks to balance it. This ensure the base of the seed is submerged in fresh water and the point end is again upwards. You will need to change the water every 2-3 days.

Germination takes 3-6 weeks, the larger the seed is the longer germination usually takes so be prepared for it do to a whole lot of nothing for a very long time.